Is there any alternative addon to Abnormal?

Support Modeling
1

I know about YAVNE but its not really supported, and ideally i want to edit custom normals with a gizmos, not by typing numbers.
Any further googling wasn’t success, but i know some cool addons sometimes doesn’t actually pop up in google at all.

And no, rotate +N is not what i want to use ever since its behaviour is clumsy and unpredictable as hell.

2

I’m curious what’s the use case for normal editing? Why would you need this?

3

Relatively common practice for video game assets, even for non mid-poly one and for cases where normal transfer didnt provide desired results.

4

Can you give an example of a problem and how you would solve it editing the normals?

5

Use cases:
Mostly in games… but also often used to transfer normals from some “more undeformed base” (in blender ) using the Data Transfer modifier… to make life easy…

( Also Weighted Normal- , Normal Edit -modifier)

There is also some explanation at the beginning of the Y.A.V.N.E thread

6

Here’s a simple example where normal editing is important:

screen
screen1108×517 81 KB

left: flat geometry
middle: just smooth shading
right: with normals edited

Well… the gizmos are missing…
But you have some good tools to edit normals, just press Alt+N, in edit mode.

7

Interesting, so what did you do with the normals there? Can you show a screenshot of the normals?

8

The normals are aligned with the big faces… Basically, I just selected each big face, CopyVectors (which averages the current selection), then PasteVectors (that sets the selection to use the averaged vector).

9

I’d be interested to see how people use this for something more complicated. If anyone does this often send me a PM and show me your workflow, what kind of normal manipulation you do, maybe we can even think of ways to automate some of it. :slight_smile:

By the way you can select those large faces and do Alt+N > Set From Faces. It does the same thing.

10