I am having a very frustrating time trying to get the proper shading on my objects. I have this model of a cyclorama wall for a video studio. Several of the pieces, which are the exact same geometry are not shaded the same way, and no matter which setting I choose, shade flat, shade smooth, shade auto-smooth, reset vectors, set normals from faces, nothing makes them look the same. I even copied the geometry from one to the other.
You can see here how different the shading is using this matcap. In the preview window, you can see one side of a piece is shaded darker than the other side. They have the same material. There should not be a difference in shading between two pieces. I have all of the edges marked sharp because prior to doing that, it was trying to smooth over the edges. It’s important that the pieces smoothly blend into each other.
And, on top of that, I am using Dynamic Paint to paint the walls, which is working fine in the preview window, but not in the render. I’m stumped.
Thanks, I originally modeled this in Lightwave and it did import with a custom split normals modifier, which I removed. I then marked the edges as sharp in Blender.
After tinkering around a bit last night (this morning) I was able to get it to look fairly decent. Then, I made all of the bottom pieces have the same linked geometry. They’re all instances of the same mesh now.
I was a bit confused with this. Are the shading settings in the object data, or the mesh data? Last night I had the same mesh data in two of them, but they were shaded differently.
I did check face orientation. At one point, I’m not sure if it was before or after I posted this, two of the objects were indeed flipped inward, but I corrected them and still had difficulty. I’ve never had so much trouble with this. I don’t know why this particular model is so difficult. Blender wants to shade edges smooth despite the fact that I marked them sharp. Finally after selecting the sides and setting the normals by face, I was able to correct it, sort of.
Do I need custom split normals for this model for some reason? I had thought that simply marking edges as sharp, the rounding would be corrected, however, I found I was wrong about that.
First, I selected the flat areas on the sides and set normals by faces. Fine, but then I selected the curved area faces and set their normals by faces. Oooops, the flat side areas now became shaded rounded, which is not what I wanted. Can two faces that share points be shaded differently, or do I NEED to add custom split normals?
Which version are you using?
As we say over and over again… post a .blend file with the geometry concerned to receive a fast and appropriate solution to your problem.
In case it should be a “mid-poly” model - yes, custom normals are necessary.
“Mid-poly” is then you make a small, mostly 1 segment bevel and want those bevels to look smooth, while keep all flat areas looks flat (as they generally should).
Something like this:
If you want to keep all edges as they are, without bevels, when you should just mark all necessary edges as sharp and set autosmooth to 180deg.
There wouldnt be any needs to use “set normals from face” command, and generally no needs for custom normals.
Some edges are sharp, some are rounded. I marked all the sharp edges as sharp, but it had no effect. The model had an edge split modifier due to having been imported from Lightwave 3D, which is probably in conflict with the way Blender normally handles the shading. Anyway, I was able to make it look nice after tinkering with it.
I thought I had this figured out, but apparently not. This face of the model wasn’t important to my render, so it didn’t matter, but I am running into this problem more and more since updating to Blender 4.2 because of the changes they made with Shade Auto Smooth. I have examined this model and the face normals are all pointed outward like they should be, no double sided faces. I shouldn’t be having this problem. That face should be shaded flat. What’s causing this? If I select them and set from faces, it fixes this, but the back side of the object gets messed up.
Shade Auto-Smooth should should fix it, but, WHAT is that??
That should not be happening, ever. That side should be flat, the three back sides should be flat, with curved bevels. The angle from the side to the back is 90 degrees.
This is all new stuff to me. Is there a tutorial on what all of these commands mean? Where is the Harden Normals command? or has that been deprecated?
This is the modifier that was added to the object when I imported it from Lightwave. I have never seen this modifier used before in any tutorial, and obviously the same effect can be achieved by different means. I deleted this.
I’m including the file here for people who want to examine it. I have never had this problem before in previous versions of Blender. Wall Cove example.blend (1.2 MB)
Thanks for the help! Hopefully this is not just me experiencing this. It’s not just this object either.
