I am afraid I am posting somewhat a naive question, but here it goes.
When you select all faces of a poly or mesh, and some of them have flipped normals, they show up in darker red in the selection.
My question is: is there some way to get these faces in a list, to get that “flag”? in order to build a function that takes that faces only and flip them.
I’ve searching around and I am afraid the problem is not that simple, but maybe someone can point me some useful information, examples…
Thanks
well you CAN unify normals in script as well, if thats all youre after. meshOp.unifyNormals
as for the selection color, thats just the face facing away I think, Im not aware of any flag saying flipped or not. comparing face normals (or clockwise order for the entries into the vertex array of whatever max is using, Id have to look that up) seems fairly non-trivial. do you need to do that?
@frilansspion Thanks a lot for your input and excuses for my late response!
As I suspected,there is no easy answer.
I am working with very complex, “dirty”models exported from Microstation (a CAD software). So there are lots of open polygons, badly formed geometry etc.
I tried unify normals both in script and with the modifier, but it doesn’t produce any results at all, the faces are still flipped. It does not have to do with the position of the camera by the way, because when you rotate the object they are still flipped.
I am guessing that you have to browse face by face, and detect which one is flipped by comparing it with the faces surrounding it? but, how do you detect a flipped normal then?
If you or somebody can point me to examples or documentation I’d appreciate it.