Whats the deal with these normals? With 2 or 3 selected the normals are correct, but when I select all four the normals change. I’m having the same issue with a cubes as well. Am I missing something here?
example:
Late response I know.
I deleted most of the stuff but you can find many spots where the normals behave strangely.
normals.blend (942 KB)
Thanks for taking a look
In object mode, apply scale and rotation (Ctrl-A). See if that fixes your normals.
I’ve looked at this and the modelling seems fairly clean. I don’t see any significant issues with it, normals or no. The normals are all facing the correct way. I don’t know where you think the problem lies; everything seems to be working as it should be.
There was one stray vertex on your ‘back_straps’ object, just as a point of reference.
I think what is happening here is because edge and vertex normal transform orientations are different concepts. When edge is selected normal transform orientation’s y axis is considered to be aligned to the direction of the edge while when vertex is selected it matches the normal of the vertex. When you have multiple things selected I suspect that Blender is a bit confused about what should be an average of all those normal transform orientations, that’s why you get funny transform orientation. It should not have anything to do with actual normals that are actually fine as Kurtis noticed as well.
Yes, looks like it doesn’t average the normals with multiple selected. I was able to repeat the issue with factory settings and with the default cube in 2.79, 2.78 and 2.77. Didn’t try other versions.
One workaround is to use active element pivot so it only uses the normals from the active mesh element, such as the edge in the middle. Another is to not move but use edge slide with or without clamp disabled. Or could fill the open edges with faces and use face normals as a reference point.
Could ask devs about the issue but probably not a regression issue since it’s in so many versions, could just be a limitation.
