Mesh Normals and ASE File Format
polycounter lvl 9
Hi everyone,
A friend and I have been working on our own engine for quite some time and recently we've been starting on adding big massive structures and other things to our game. Something I've been encountering is weird normals on my objects (which result in poor looking objects in game). Here is a picture illustrating the issue:
As you can notice, in Ficus, our engine, theres some really wierd normal issues on this test asset. I've gone into the normals editor modifier in max and tried to manually change them, but no luck there either. However, the problem seems to be there if select all normals and unify them in the normals editor. I'm starting to believe it might be the ASE file format we use for the engine and that they some how get unified on export. I've tried exporting with ASE WITHOUT "Mesh normals" checked and still have had zero luck... Does anyone have any experience with issues like this?
A friend and I have been working on our own engine for quite some time and recently we've been starting on adding big massive structures and other things to our game. Something I've been encountering is weird normals on my objects (which result in poor looking objects in game). Here is a picture illustrating the issue:
As you can notice, in Ficus, our engine, theres some really wierd normal issues on this test asset. I've gone into the normals editor modifier in max and tried to manually change them, but no luck there either. However, the problem seems to be there if select all normals and unify them in the normals editor. I'm starting to believe it might be the ASE file format we use for the engine and that they some how get unified on export. I've tried exporting with ASE WITHOUT "Mesh normals" checked and still have had zero luck... Does anyone have any experience with issues like this?
Replies
On the left the mesh has 1 smoothing group, on the right, the correct amount.
Is there another model format that Ficus accepts? Try that.
I bet you're getting the middle result here, what Quack suggested.
@Eric - I encountered these problems as well in a little program called Assimp Viewer, which actually allows you to switch between Smooth and Hard normals (in addition to the original ones) and started to get an idea of where to go from there. Interesting stuff!