Why this simple object looks so awfully uneven despite the normals are OK and how can I fix it?
Turn off smooth shading
Well, is that what you wanted to achieve?
If not, is that vertex bevel? I don’t know. Hard to tell without .blend.
No, I want evenly colored / lit faces.
There is no bevel, all surfaces shown are flat.
What Acrivec said. It’s hard to tell what the problem is without being able to futz around with the mesh itself.
Though on a lark of a guess, I’d say you have some coplanar faces or vertices in there. Try running merge by distance, and maybe recalculate your normals.
Possible, but z-fighting would look a bit different, unless he moved the verticles after duplicating.
I’ve experienced a couple of occasions where having a random accidental vert created weird shading issues like that before.
The odd thing about it is that it’s consistent across all his faces. One messed up face is understandable. Multiple faces messed up in the exact same way? That’s odd.
Is there a way to clear any previous vertex-paint?
I think this might be the issue, but whatever I tried, didn’t have any effect.
Anyway, here it is:
multi-D-shape_3.blend (696.7 KB)
Yeah. You go into your mesh settings, and delete the vertex colors there. I did that, and it didn’t make any difference
Turning off autosmooth fixed the issue, though I have no idea why that would mess up your shading like that. It also has the smoothing angle option greyed out, which I’ve never seen before.
I’ll goof around with it a bit more, see if I can find out the exact reason.
> I did that, and it didn’t make any difference
> Turning off autosmooth fixed the issue, though I have no idea why that would mess up your shading like that. It also has the smoothing angle option greyed out, which I’ve never seen before.
There is one possible explanation: we are in the twilight zone! LOL
Okay. Recalculating your normals didn’t fix your issue, but running and applying the Normal Edit modifier did. Also, you’ll want to flip your faces, since they’re pointing inwards.
You still have issues with autosmoothing though. I can turn it on and off, but all that does is switch the model from flat to smooth shading. I can’t mark sharp edges, or make any changes beyond the bare basics. Deleting your vertex data makes no difference one way or another here.
…what all did you do to this mesh?
I’d say we’ve got at least one foot in there, yeah. 
Figured it out. Go to your mesh properties tab, head down to Geometry Data, and clear your custom split normals data.
It’s always something simple.
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You’re awesome, thanks! 
Blender should provide complete feedback to the user about all the stuff that affects an object, bone, etc somehow all in one place, like an advanced, visual version of the outliner, in order to be able to solve all problems right away. In the near future hopefully…
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