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Nintendraw — MMD Tut: Fix Bad Normals/Holey Extrusion Error
#extrusion #mmd #normals #tutorial #mikumikudance #pmdeditor #nintendraw #pmxeditor
Published: 2016-10-03 22:47:15 +0000 UTC; Views: 2880; Favourites: 38; Downloads: 81
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SORRY FOR SPAMMING YOUR INBOX; I JUST KEEP REMEMBERING THINGS TO ADD. I'M DOING THIS RIGHT NOW FOR AZURA, WHICH IS WHY ALL THE UPDATES.Because I've run into this with two models in a row (Corrin and Azura) and I'm sick of having to undo extrusions for this reason. Not only that, poly-normal vertices (what I'm calling these points that meet at the same xyz coordinate but have different normals) can cause strange shadows to appear. I hope this helps someone!
NOTE: PMDe may "try" to be helpful by making those selected/orange vertices appear at other points after merging any poly-normal vertex. Some of those do indeed have multiple normals. Do NOT merge the auto-selected points, though, because this is likely to cause a mesh glitch instead.
By the way, the middle screenshot uses the Weights view (mode > D , blocked by Japanese hover text), which is very useful for seeing what's rigged to where.
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Comments: 7
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Thanks for the tutorial!
There may be times when merging vertices in order to get good normals is a bad idea-- usually, you can tell, because it screws up your texture mapping, leaving you with weird, boxy stripes on the adjacent faces.
But there is another way to do this, and it's easy enough that you can probably get away with just selecting all your vertices and doing it, without even worrying about anything bad happening.
Average Near Normals (just above Average Face Normals in your last panel) looks at all the vertices, and if they're close enough, it takes the average of their normals and applies it to all of the vertices in that range. Since this problem usually occurs with vertices that are right on top of each other, you can afford to be very specific with this, adding a very extra zeroes to the default.
The only time you don't want to do this is if you have some faces separated in order to give very hard edges; Average Near Normals will end up softening those edges. Thankfully, these kinds of surfaces tend to have their own materials, separate from "soft" surfaces like bodies where you want good, smooth, continuous normals, so you can usually just mask by material before Averaging Near Normals to avoid any problems.
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I did know about the UV messing up error, and many to mention that caveat, but somehow I never figured out the use of Average Near Normals until now. Thanks!
The major reason I made this, though, was to remind myself how to get continuous shapes with Extrusion when adjacent faces share edges, but not vertices. For some reason, selecting all the faces to extrude in this situation makes holes appear for me. Do you know how to get around that? (There's a specific piece I'm having this issue with; if you like, I could send it your way for troubleshooting.)
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You know, it took me forever to figure out Average Near Normals myself. Even though it was staring me in the face. I actually edited normals manually many, many times when it was a texture seam issue, cursing and spitting the whole way. And now that I know about Average Normals, I try to let everybody know so that they never have to enter numbers in the normal fields like I did
Are you making something sharp edged? Personally, I don't like perfectly hard edges on anything, even on cubes. Usually, by making an extra, "unnecessary" edge near an existing edge, you can make a very, very sharp edge (just not perfectly sharp), without leaving any of your vertices disconnected from each other. The knife should be good enough for making these kind of cuts.
I don't tend to use much PMXE for my modelling anymore, I tend to do whatever mesh work I need in Blender. And the situations are probably different. I don't tend to do a lot of face extrusion either. But if you send me the model, along with a decent description of the kind of things you're trying to do, I'd be happy to take a look at it, explore a little bit. Just can't make any promises that I'd know any better than you.
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I think I figured out a way around it (hooray for PMXe's Join Near Vertices); never mind! Thanks anyway!
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I remember someone (BennyBruitt?) making a tut about fixing normals generally using Edit > Normals > N or F (I like F better), but I totally forgot I could do this one until Azura gave me the same issue as Corrin. It's a pain in the arse locating all the holes and extra faces generated by Extrusion after the fact, imo.
EDIT: You can even model basic 3D shapes, ropes, and text straight in PMDe using the Primitive tool! It's more complex than most take it for.
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