"Normalizing" Normals

[guyverz]

Hello Everyone,

I'm modifying an imported .DXF object that has really messed up polygon normals. Not only are some of the normals flipped (which I know how to correct using Flip and Align), but a lot (hundreds) of them are at very strange angles causing the texture to display/render incorrectly.

I'm fairly new to Lightwave (7.5b btw), and I was wondering if anyone knew of an easy way to "normalize" the normal of multiple polygons at the same time. I simply want them to face out and at a 90 degree angle from the polygon. Or how I can do this for one polygon at a time -- which I am NOT looking forward to.

I found a plugin on www.flay.com called Normal Corrector that sounds like it would do what I want. Unfortunately, the site is in Japanese/Chinese (sorry, I don't know the diff.).

Please, I would appreciate any suggestions.

:confused:

[Mylenium]

Well, if your normals don't look normal they quite likely belong to non planar polygons. This can happen, since LW will import quads from DXF as quads. Unfortunately quads are ambiguous in many ways. I suggest trying the following steps:

a) Merge all vertices/ points! Use automatic and maybe even the absolute mode with a very little value. This should eliminate a not so minor amount of critical polys.

b) Triple all remaining bad polys! Merge them back manually or use tools like MergeTrigonX or Reduce Polygons (with angle set to 0 it will normally do nothing or very little). This will change the internal order of how LW handles points and polys and should fix most problems.

c) There may be some holes to mend manually using the make poly tool.

After you are done, you should end up with a halfway clean model. all you need to do then is to remove all unwanted 1- and 2-point polys as well as unconnected points.

Mylenium

[guyverz]

Thanks Mylenium,

I'll try your suggestions, but I don't think non-planar poly's are the problem because the poly's in question are already triangles so Triple won't work.