I have been having a very frustrating day. I made a Jeep that renders perfectly in Simlab Composer:





This is my 7 year old daughters colour scheme!

But when I import in into 3D Coat some of the normals are inverted. I have tried splitting it apart and joining it together (many times) The piece concerned forms a solid (although some other objects intersect with it. (Didn't think of merging them until just now so might also try that too). I took it into Blender and the normals are reversed and the command to make them consistent has no effect. I have tried fiddling with the import options in 3D Coat but nothing worked. I notice from various threads that some people are using Moi and 3D coat together and I have not had this problem using this combination before.

Two pictures below first without backface culling ticked and the second with.












Maybe its something I need to post to the 3D Coat forum?
Thanks
Keith

Hi Keith, that's unlike Blender to not be able to sort normals. I don't know how experienced you are with Blender, but just in case ...

Right click part to correct normals
Press Tab to enter edit mode
Make sure you have edit faces selected and press 'a' to select all faces
If you see no menu on the left side of the screen, press 't'
Select shading and UV's
Click Recalculate

That should fix any issues.

Martin
(TpwUK)

There is a command in Moi "Flip" that allows you to flip your surface normals before exporting to 3D Coat.

Unfortunately one of the problems in Moi is there is no command to view your surface normals like you can in Rhino. Maybe v4 will get such a feature, have to wait and see.

So yeh best to sort fix the normals issue in blender first, then go to 3D Coat.

Hi Keith, it's difficult to tell what might be going wrong just from screenshots alone. Is it possible for you to post the 3DM model file of one of the more simple structured solids that is not getting normals going the right way?

If your solid has anything like self intersecting surfaces or degenerate surfaces that are tiny collapsed slivers, those are some of the things that can tend to confuse the mechanism that creates outward facing normals for solids.

- Michael

Hi Michael
Maybe you never sleep?
On exporting just crashed too. Maybe coincidence.
Thanks
Keith

Hi Keith, thanks for posting the 3DM file, I will take a look at it. Can you also please send me the moi_report11.zip crash report file as well? You can e-mail that to me at moi@moi3d.com .

- Michael

Hi Keith, so the problem seems to be some messed up edges in this scalloped out area here:





I separated out the surfaces for that area, then untrimmed and retrimmed them, and then rejoined them to get it fixed up, it looks like the fillets there end just very slightly off alignment from the closed surface seam for the scalloped surface and that was confusing the joining process, I had to join things back in a particular order to get that spot to work ok.

Please try the attached 3DM file and see if that works better for you now. And if you can send me the crash dump report for the crash I might be able to see what's going on with that too.

- Michael

Thanks for your suggestions Martin and Kevin, I did try both and although neither worked this time they were new things for me to learn. Michael fixed things overnight. Great customer support, thanks Michael.

While casting about for solutions yesterday I noticed that Moi is not on the Blender Wiki list of computer modelling programes. Seems a bit of an oversight.
Best wishes
Keith