Problem with artefacts and normals

Hello guys and girls, like you see on the pictures here, i have a really huge problem and i hope someone can help me because I already spent so much time on this try to model my own face :).


So, on some parts the normals are weirdly flipped and i dont know the cause. Recalculating doesnt help (it only flips everything). I once cutted the parts which are now flipped out, separted them to an own object to make a hair particlesystem and turned the rendering of the ermitter in this sytem of. Then I jooined the meshes togehter again, now i sculpted a bit, merged the ear with easy boolean operations and now i opened the file again and noticed this.

But that wasnt the only problem on the nose is now somehow a weird spike, which is only visble in object mode and the mesh is completely normal in edit mode.

I really hope somone can help me. Im relatively new to blender (3months) and i invested much time to this project .(

Thanks in advance
Marc

Odd… can you post a .blend?

Hi there,

That is likely the source of the problem. You had your mesh separated in bits and when you joined them back together those some parts had different normal direction (maybe you recalculated normals on one part after splitting the mesh and it flipped the normals because it’s not a closed mesh so the program does a best guess which could go either way. Once joined, you had different direction normals in the same open mesh and the program can’t decided which direction is the right one (because it’s an open mesh), so it merely flips everything.

One easy fix is to manual select those faces (face select mode) and flip normals.

For the spike in the nose, it looks like you got a rogue vertex hanging out. Hard to tell from you screenshot but check if you have backface culling on, it could hide the face if it’s a single face facing back (in edit mode) and the vertex could be on the symmetrical axis (try disabling the mirror if you have one on and check the mesh).

Note that your topology is less than ideal: you have a pole right on the top side of the nose (that makes two with symmetry on) and the edge loop between the crease of the nose and the cheek is misplaced as the edges are too high on the nose which make the face act as a crease but they can’t (by virtue of being flat).

Also, note that you have a very high mesh density with very little actual detail. It would be better I think to work with a lower mesh density, get your edge loops right and then work with a Multiresolution modifier if you want to sculpt or simply a Subdivision modifier for smoother render. It is also a great exercise to level up your skills at modeling and you can go a long way with a low level mesh well setup.

Here is a face I made quite some time ago, it’s far from perfect and needs some edge loop cleaning but it’s just to illustrate that low density mesh can be a good starting point and are easier to fix if some vertices are misplaced.