I’m having trouble getting my model to render correctly. The faces flicker black in some places.
I’ve tried recalculating normals, removing doubles, and checked for overlapping faces, but no luck. 
Could somebody take a look at it for me please? 
MinifigsProblem.blend (45.5 KB)
This is an easy one. You have turned on “Set Smooth” in the Links and Materials panel, but haven’t used “Auto Smooth” in the mesh panel. If you would like even more control and get a nice view in the 3D window, you can use an edge split modifier http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Modifiers/Mesh/EdgeSplit
HTH
In Editing (F9) -> Mesh, turn on No V.Normal Flip. I still haven’t got a clue as to why Blender would want to randomly flip some normals by default, but it does.
Please view this:
http://www.guerrillacg.org/home/3d-polygon-modeling/smooth-shading
And why should he turn on No V. Normal Flip? That is mostly not such a good idea.
That worked perfectly!
Thanks!
Good link - but nothing I didn’t know before.
Blender has an odd tendency to sometimes flip the normals of some vertices for, as far as I can tell, no good reason at all. This results in a crease, even if you didn’t call for it. Go ahead, give Minfig’s .blend a try. Only if you turn on No V.Normal Flip will the rendered result be the same as you have in viewport.
Are there any downsides to No V.Normal Flip that you’re aware of? As far as I can tell, it only fixes this odd issue, but never hurts.
Apart from the fact that faces are rendered right only from one side,
And no vertex normal flip does change nothing for me, neither in the viewport nor for the render in the current case. But it may be, that I haven’t noticed the problem …
