Hi Michael

I use MOI3D a lot for cleaning up and meshing IGES files to ready for rendering in LightWave3D.

The biggest headache I encounter all the time are flipped surfaces, where the original modeler hasn't bothered to make sure all the surfaces are facing the 'correct' direction. I can flip the offending meshed polygons in LightWave after import, but often, editing surfaces in MOI3D is much quicker and easier.

Clearly I can use MOI3D's flip command, but the problem is I have no idea which surfaces need flipping because they are double-sided shaded. Is there anyway to get MOI3D to show or preview the surfaces as single-sided as they might appear when meshed?

Ideally, it would be awesome if there was a surface direction repair tool that could eliminate these issues with imported IGES files, then my world would be complete! :)

Other than that, MOI3D is such an awesome tool in my armoury!

Cheers
Matt

Hi Matt, there is not currently any way to turn off double sided shading.

In the future I do want to add a tool that would display the back side of a surface in some different color so that you could visually identify the direction and click on things to flip them. I'm not sure exactly when that will happen, maybe sometime in v3 though.

In the meantime the primary tool for this is actually Join - instead of having a whole lot of individual open surfaces you are best off having those surfaces joined together where they touch to ideally form closed solids.

If you have a closed joined solid, the mesh produced from that will automatically be aligned to have surface normals going to the outside of the solid.

Also even if you can't easily get the whole thing closed, it is still good to join together as many things as possible because a joined piece will have a consistent normal direction throughout it, so that makes for larger chunks of things that can be flipped at once.

- Michael