I'm having problems with normals in maya.

I'm following 3ds max tutorial, where guy is creating poly plane to use it for grass later on.

The thing is, he rotates vertex normals, so that all vertex normal are positioned upwards. This way, he gets same shading on both sides.

I'm trying to replicate this in maya, with no luck. I enabled both vertex and face normals in viewport, then i use set vertex normal tool to point them upwards. And indeed, vertex normals ARE poting upwards.

The problem is, i'm still getting one side way darker then the other. And when i check face normals, they are not rotated together with vertex normals, so maybe that is the problem.

In any case, how can i achive this in maya, that if i have vertical poly plane, and rotate vertex noraml upwards, that i have same shading on both sides. Seems to easily work in 3ds, so no idea why is it not working in maya....

I'm pretty sure this is due to the shading model of a particular shader. In the 3dmotive foliage tutorial he even goes as far as making a custom shading model in UDK so this works.

My "Solution" which isn't much of one, but helps me to preview that things are shading correctly:
I select all the pieces of foliage (grass in your case), and group them together.
Turn on backface culling.
Then duplicate the group and reverse all the normals.
At this point it should shade like what you were seeing in Max.

The downside to this is if you merge everything together, it is a nightmare to delete the duplicated group.

So, after you selected your vertices, then go to Normals > Set Vertex Normal, and set your X Value to 0, Y to 1, Z to 0, it's still not working?

Heh tnx!

Funny, that is actually the tutorial series i was look at, but i'm at the part where he is still in 3ds max.

Well, what you say sounds cool, as long as i know it is properly shaded.

While i get the udk part, i'm still not sure, did he use in 3ds max any special tricks, or does 3ds max just works diffrently then maya, and when you set normals up, it actually shades same on both sides?

--edited--

@tristamus
It works in one face, but the other side is black. changing normal affects one side, but seems like opposite side is always darker no matter what.
I just tried m4dcow's suggestion, and if i have 2 separate planes, but with same normal rotation, then both faces are same (even though one has opposite direction).

But if it's just one polygon, then no matter what i do, one side is always darker.

Originally Posted by Zocky

Heh tnx!

Funny, that is actually the tutorial series i was look at, but i'm at the part where he is still in 3ds max.

Well, what you say sounds cool, as long as i know it is properly shaded.

While i get the udk part, i'm still not sure, did he use in 3ds max any special tricks, or does 3ds max just works diffrently then maya, and when you set normals up, it actually shades same on both sides?

He didn't really use any tricks to my recollection, but when he brings it into UDK, it shades dark on the backfaces and he does a custom lighting model that fixes it.

In UDK some people just say to use the "MLM unlit" lighting model, but then you lose all shading information which doesn't look the greatest.

Ah i see. So whatever he does in 3ds max, isn't really important, it doesn't translate into udk anyway and works same as in maya?

i think you are having the same problem as in this recent thread. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=94585

the solution is on the last page

Ok i'll take a look into it.

Tnank everyone for really quick help, i must say!