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Mar 28, 2024, 3:11 PM

"Normals" - Simple mesh shading

This is a discussion for the topic "Normals" - Simple mesh shading on the board NFS:HS Workshop.

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on: Feb 13, 2012, 1:44 PM
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One very important thing you'll come across when it comes to modifying or modeling a car from scratch, are normals. You might ask yourself now, what are normals? Normals on a 3d model have the purpose to make different surfaces visible without modeling edges and so save polies. The example in this tutorial is a part of a quite edgy car from the seventies / eighties, the Porsche 924:



The most important thing is, that you have to understand and recognize the different surfaces, edges and shapes of a car. If you don't, you won't be able to get a perfect mesh. On a side note a little tip, whenever you work on a car, try to find it in reality and look at it, take photos and so understand the design. On our example you should recognize the marked surfaces as basic different reflecting areas:



When you create a mesh from scratch, you need to align polies properly and so allow the polies to follow these surfaces. You can't make a border with normals where no splines are. This is our example mesh with the corresponding lines drawn on the wireframes which obey the surface borders:



However, you do notice the way too smooth shading and the black spots around the plate, thats where you can see that only following the lines doesnt automatically generate those surfaces. That's our plain mesh without normals and textures:



Here you can see a few of the wrong reflections (too smooth / black spots)



The next step is to detach the different surfaces. This will be explained on the center line only.

Step 1: Select the polies in faces mode
Step 2: Use Create/Objects/Detach to make your surface become a sepparate object
Step 3: Use Surface / Normals / Calculate to get the lighting information of the surfaces recalculated; Fuse your object and your detach by selecting both in object mode, and clicking on them with Create/Objects/Unite Select , and there you go.



Take a closer look and you will notice the difference of before and after. Once you've finished, you should have a proper result, like this:



Good normals are a highly important aspect for a car's quality. A lot of bad looking cars can be saved with some work on the normals. Again the reminder, make sure you understood the shape. Another thing to watch are the flat shades, they should be somewhat plain, however they still have to represent the actual shape of the car.

Difficult spots such as the side air intake on our Porsche 969 require a lot of work as you'll have to figure out a good polie structure allowing good reflections without wasting polies. Often you just have to try out different polie structures, sometimes turning the polie row direction may help. Just to give you an idea of how much work that tiny air intake was, I've worked for roundabout six hours on getting a good result.


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