weirdly drawn normals

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1

I finally got around to downloading blender 2.33a and running it. some weird stuff happening with the normals. They don’t look like they are drawn properly. Normals should be drawn perpendicular to the surfaces, but most of them look like they’re drawn almost vertical. If the surface slopes slightly up, the normals point almost straight up. if the surface slopes a bit down, normals point almost straight down. It’s hard to describe, so If someone can tell me how to take a screenshot (never done it before) than I can post a screenshot of this.

2

sounds odd…

normals should be perpendicular to the face

[and you sure you’re not talking about the optimal subsurf thing?]

that said, you can take a screenshot with control+f3 [will save in type specified in render buttons] for the blender window, or control+shift+f3 for the entirety of blender

[or alt+pritscreen and pasting into your favorite image app in windows, or using the screenshot gimp plugin in linux or…]

3

Here’s the image:
http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~cs203217/images/weird_norm.png

as you can see, subsurfs are off.
The effect is most visible on the spikes on the large turret on the tower. I was having some lighting problems, and wondered if this was the source of it…

anyone else seen anything like that?

4

Well, I don’t know what caused the problem, but I was able to fix it. Here’s how:

  1. create new file.
  2. append the offending object from the other file
  3. create a new object in the new file (a simple cube worked)
  4. set the mesh of the new file to be the mesh of the object from the old file
  5. remove the appended object.
  6. scale the new object to (approximately) the right size
    here’s where things got weird:
  7. I had to re-orient the mesh of the new object, it was 90 deg off. So I rotated in Edit mode and it looked like the normals got bent!!!
    8 ) left edit mode and rotated the whole object… seems to work fine now…

but it was strange that it happened in the 1st place…

5

that’s totally weird. you should make a bug report.

6

a good idea. and I’ll post the .blend if anyone wants to have a look.

oh… who do i send bug reports to?

7

well, first you have to go to the blender.org area, and then, even if you are already a member of blender.org, you have to register for a password at the bug tracker forum, and eventually they will send you a password, at which time you can leave a bug report. :wink:

8

bug report submitted as: [ #1417 ] weirdly drawn normals