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Old 26th June 2003, 10:47 PM   #1
surfimp
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Default Getting all normals facing same direction?

OK, I've been fooling around with a really nice aircraft model that I downloaded, and the normals are all screwed up when the model is viewed in the simulator that I'm working with (Slope Soaring Sim). Is there a way to force all normals to point one direction? Currently about half face the "right" way, and the other half face the "wrong" way...so it looks as though I've got a skeleton flying through the air LOL.

I'm sure this is a common newbie problem, and I have tried fixing it myself through various combinations of selecting surfaces and trying to either switch their normals or make the surfaces two sided. It doesn't seem to be working...of course, the model looks fine within the 3D preview window of AC3D, making the job tougher.

Am I going to have to go through the model and switch offending normals by hand? That could take a while...oh boy!
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Old 27th June 2003, 01:18 PM   #2
Andy
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Default Re: Getting all normals facing same direction?

I think it was Rick that said he was going to write a plugin to do this. Currently, here's not yet a function to do this automatically, however there are some things you can do to make this process easier.

Switch on display of normals (orth and 3d menus) the direction of each surface is indicated by a line. (you can change the length of the normal lines from file->settings).

Setting all surfaces to be single-sided will help in the 3D window where you should be able to tell where flipped surfaces are - these are the ones that need to be selected and have Surface->flip-normals run on them.

To select more than one surface in the 3D window, hold down control and shift whilst clicking on each surface. (clicking ensures you only select the surfaces that's directly under the mouse, dragging would select everything under the mouse).

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Old 28th June 2003, 02:17 AM   #3
surfimp
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Default Re: Getting all normals facing same direction?

Thanks Andy, that's pretty much the conclusion I came to. Oh boy, that's a lot of work, hope that plugin gets written
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