> But it does, and I guess the devs have their reasons, or
> maybe it's just old leftover code.

Check out this other post about it:

http://geheim.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13141&view=next&sid=41ba63d8dcc1ad464905c435d109c552

There could be some situations like with displacement maps or something like render-time subdivision where you would expect for the renderer to make vertex normals because it is making geometry in those situations.

But when it is not making new geometry, that's when it should use the vertex normals that were included along with the existing geometry that is being rendered.

Probably what happened was to support something kinds of stuff like displacement maps, they added some code to generate all vertex normals but without skipping over things that did not need (and actually are degraded from) having new normals calculated.


> Have you tried my 2.5 build?

Just tried it now - it looks like it is working fine.


- Michael

Works here also, thanks!

Will check this out...

Marc

I suppose it's not a good idea to change blender's default rendering/editing behavior. So, in an effort to increase the chances of having my patch accepted by the blender devs, I made the change an option in user preferences, and it's off by default.

I did this both 2.49b:

and 2.5x:


I'm trying hard to follow good programming guidelines, and no one wants this in the official version more than me. I'm done with this project for now, but if there's anything else I can do to make this better, let me know.

Some links may have changed, please download from my page.

Hi Anthony

This looks like a really good (and necessary) improvement!

I'm just starting out using Blender (pretty bad interface for me to learn lol).

So I've just downloaded the 2.5 version of Blender from your website - is there anything else I need? (import script or something?)

Or can I just export the model from Moi, and (as long as i've enabled the preserve normals setting in blender) it will work?

Cheers!

Hi NightCabbage, you do also need an additional import script to go along with Anthony's build to get the best results.

There's some info and a link to Anthony's Blender import script here:
http://moi3d.com/wiki/Resources#Blender_importer


> Or can I just export the model from Moi, and (as long as
> i've enabled the preserve normals setting in blender) it
> will work?

As far as I understand, Anthony's new "preserve normals" setting will make Blender stop throwing away the normals in circumstances where it used to like going into edit mode, or also when rendering.

But that setting doesn't have anything to do with the file import itself, you still need to use an importer that will be able to bring the normals into Blender in the first place (which the default set of importers do not handle).

In addition to Anthony's import script there is also an OBJ import script which I modified to not throw away the normals at the last step of the import like the regular one happens to do. That's available here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3164.11
I'm not quite sure if that OBJ one works with Blender 2.5 or only with Blender 2.49

- Michael