Here is a technique to improve a lot how simple planes looks when lit. This is a lot used in video games nowadays and actually I don’t know any ways to do such things in Blender.
Here is another paper on that.
Is there any ways to edit normals manually in Blender ? Someone told me I can do it with python but, first, I don’t know nothing about python, plus, I guess it will take a lot of times for things such as trees and stuff like that
Any ideas ?
I’ve actually been wondering about that same thing recently.
Unfortunately, Blender has no built-in way to set custom normals(it even resets the normals when you import an obj file!), but it might be possible to do it with a python script(I’m talking a Blender python script, not an in-game one). Unfortunately, I don’t know how to access normals with Python, so you’ll need someone more knowledgeable to help you there.
A word of warning: I’ve heard that entering edit mode resets any custom normals assigned to a mesh, and that custom normals don’t show up in renders. But if you never enter edit mode after setting the normals with Python, it should work fine in the BGE.
Sorry I couldn’t be of more help, but I thought I might as well share what I know.
Too bad we can’t edit normals. I heard it’s quite painful to do that in 3dsmax too.
Actually, I don’t need that feature now, but I might need it in the futur to export stuff to Ogre3d so I guess I’ll just wait ^^
I have been thinking about this to - most remembering what parts fit together after cutting up a mesh, and setting normal’s on both parts to an average - also move the vertex of the other part if one part is edited. I think vertex groups could be used to keep track of vertices shared between parts.
But to customary edit normal’s would be good to - If other editing tools destroy them the offsets could be stored in a vertex color channel. But they have to survive conversion in game (don’t know if they do) - even if we can access normal’s in game I don’t think we have access to ‘extra’ vertex color channels in game.
