I am very keen to see this in action as I’m working in game development where such tools are gold.
Now I’m wondering, if anybody got it working? It seems like nothing from Mesh > Normals menu is working at the moment (been trying daily builds for a week now). Can anybody confirm that?
I just tested. Normal tools are working in latest build.
Tools in the menu are greyed out and will have no effect by default.
You have to enable custom normals by enabling Auto Smooth option in Normals panel of Mesh properties, first.
When mesh is using custom normals, you can use the tools.
@zeauro yep, I’m doing exactly that. But I get same result as @xrg shown above. Can you select vertices and use Rotate Normal operator without a problem?
EDIT: looks like some of the tools work somehow, but not in edit mode. I have to do some operation in edit mode, go to object mode and then I can see a change. But as soon as I switch back to edit mode I get completely broken normals (as on picture above). Additionally blender crashes for me while using Point Normal To Target and then using Ctrl + LMB. Which in fact does sth completely irrelevant to normals. For example just now that operation copied whole selection instead of setting normals to point in that direction.
Currently, they are not easy to use because overlay of custom normals is not working and does not update while using them.
Some of them would probably be easier as active tools with manipulators.
It is always possible to obtain black areas by making contradictory orientations to adjacent faces.
And these extreme changes can be emphasized by Studio Lighting used.
You should try with a matcap or a better lighting.
To me, they are working as they should. In edit mode or with modifiers like bevel or weighted normal.
It looks like I have no problem with UVmaps or Vertex Colors, here.
Having color boundary corresponding to corners of faces makes subtle smoothing tweaking less noticeable.
But where color change is smooth or absent, smoothing changes should still be visible.
in 2.79 I use the YAVNE addon if thats what its called
It has a function to copy normals from an object to another object as a whole, as in all faces or selected faces.
Can’t seem to do the same with 2.8’s normal editing stuff
SPYNeox - copy the normals from where to where? 2.8 has a function to copy a single normal and paste it to another single normal, but I think you are asking for more?
By the way, the overlay display of custom normals was recently fixed in 2.8.