I'm new to maya and new to this forum so hopefully this is a simple question to answer.
I'm making a model of a chair for a maya class and the faces don't look right. I know it has to do with the vertex normals because they aren't even.
Hopefully this picture will tell you what my problem is.
How can I make everything look more natural?
Any advice will be appreciated, thank you.
Sep '10
Sep '10
It's hard to tell what the problem is from the attached pic, but your normals are definately all messed up.
First thing you should do is unlock all normals; select all verts Normals>Unlock Normals.
Having soft edges where you should have hard edges and vis-versa can also cause issues. With an edge selected you can set it as a hard edge or soft edge under Normal>Soften Edge, or Normal>Harden Edge. You can also use the Normal>Set Normal angle... setting to have it automatically set a edge as a hard edge if it's over a certain angle from its adjacent face.
You can usually get what you need by first unlocking the normals, playing with the set normal angle setting until it gets it most of the way there, and then hand setting any edges with the soften edge or hard edge to fix any remaining issues.
Oh, it's also a good idea to run Merge Vertices; Edit Mesh>Merge (then set to like .001) to fix any unmerged vertices which can screw up normals. Also Mesh>Cleanup can be used to fix Nonmanifold geometry, or Lamina faces... sometimes it's just badly geometry that causes issues.
Hope this helps.
Hardening and softening edges helps but takes a while. I'll try using the Set Normal Angle tool more often. I guess there's no super easy fix.
Thank you.
I guess there's no super easy fix.
Well your main problem is the workflow. Theres a problem with the normals, true, but thats not the cause of the problems. Yourhow you build your geometric shape is actually the culprit fo the normal problem. As even WITH smooth normals the geometry will not look good. Because the underlying polygonals structure is so whacked. So theres really no way that the normals may work out very well even with saner settings.
Your exhibiting very bad case of box modelling syndrome.
