hi,
i recently began to use duplivert as a modeling technique for nice curved halways etc. however for some of the lamps are facing the wrong direction, and other are correct. is there a way to edit the vertext normal one at a time and determine its direction?
Tab into Edit mode and goto F9 buttons, Mesh Tools 1 tab, and turn on “Draw Normals”. “NSize” changes the length of the blue lines. Select each face (Blender has only FaceNormals, not VertexNormals), hit W >> Flip Normals.
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on that panel is also draw vNormals which are vertex normals. blender uses them for dupliverts.
what version of blender are u using? as far as i know, blender uses vnormals since before 2.37a
-thanks anyway, but i mean not to flip the vertex normal, i mean to literally edit its direction (lets say rotate one by 12 degree, another by -45 degree etc.
The vNormals is just a display. The only way to alter them is to alter the contiguous edges (which is the same as saying alter the FaceNormal).
You can do what you want with a Path or a Curve set to 3D.
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Joeri Kassenaar is apparently developing editable vertex normals for a future Blender version. Right now they are simply derived from the adjacent face normals, as fligh indicated.
So what you are saying is that you want the lamps to face in the right directions.
We’ll then make an empty and track to Constraint to the lamp and the lamp should follow the empty wherever you point it to.
by lamp i mean a modeled, wall hanging lamp, not a light source.
thats y i need the vertex normals to be able to be rotated, so that it hangs correctly on the wall.
In your duplivert settings, do you also have the Rot button activated? This would cause your lamps to be rotated in the direction of the vertex normals. Try turning the Rot button off and see if your lamps are now all facing in the same direction. Then you could rotate then in unison if they are pointing to the wrong direction.
To get individual control, you could try making the dupli-objects real (Select the dupliverting parent mesh then press Ctrl Shift A). No need to get stuck at one problem when there are workarounds.