Mesh Normals

It's probably due to my inexperience with realtime rendering, but why does Ogre reset normals?

The thing is that I made a tree, in fact alot of trees, built from planes (the good old billboard technique) and it's all alright except one thing. Without much ambient and with extreme lighting, the billboards and their cuts on the model become very apparent. A way how to get rid of this is to sort of dumb down mesh objects normals and push them all more up (as a result giving the object a light-dependant ambient sort of.

While of course this method has it's problems, it doesn't even work with Ogre. When seen through oFusion viewport, the normals are as if reset.

I'm trying to find a way to work out the billboards opposing face lighting problem and can't seem to find a way. Is there a simple way to create light-dependant ambient for unlit faces depending on lit faces lights?

Dont create smoothing groups in your objects (select all the polygons and clear the smth groups), and make all normals to point up

It doesn't work.

Unless I really don't know how to clear smoothing groups (went to edit poly mode, selected all polygons, under Smoothing Groups selected Clear All), then don't know how to change normals (with Edit Normals modifier), then I also reset XForm just in case and collapsed all to single edit mesh, it does not work. I also tried through Smooth modifier by not using any settings which should also take smoothing groups off. I also tried the same under Edit Poly.

oFusion viewport displays it as if it has reset normals.

Any help Lioric? Does it even work in oFusion since another thread in this forum seems to imply that it's not possible with oFusion?


(before you ask yes, before clicking on Clear All I did select all polygons first, yes I did restart oFusion viewport just in case as well, yes I tried reseting XForm just in case)

Any advice then Lioric?

I will add this to my list of scenes to tests, and post the results in the next days

I will add this to my list of scenes to tests, and post the results in the next days

Alright, thank you. And if you manage to use customized normals, then I'd love to know what exactly you did, since I've still not found a way to use custom normals.

It may be that oFusion resets normals in every object, or just does not use custom normals at all. Which seems quite weird considering how important normals are for certain things. Most games, before speedtree technology, used normals to hide the billboard aspects of plantation.

So anything yet? I have a presentation deadline coming up to display the billboard trees under different lighting and this is quite a troublesome stepping stone since I'd rather display them in Ogre than in 3ds max window for obvious reasons.

Maybe someone else has gotten the custom normals to work?

the only thing I can suggest if the normals thing does not work is to use self-illumination for the trees- it's crude yet it gives good reliable results.

Sadly it does not give me what I want. Self Illumination messes up anything but mid-day cloudy sky lit lighting. You can't have sun creating contrast at all, or it would look very fake, and the less lighting you have in the scene would mean more noticable self-illumination. (and I won't even touch the issue of -color- which in self-illumination case would be different compared to that of the dynamic light)

I will add this to my list of scenes to tests, and post the results in the next days

Any news?

Please, I'm still hoping for an answer. This is by all accounts a simple question with straightforward answer. I'd prefer to hear it's not possible with oFusion exporter to export custom normals than not hear anything at all.

We have not tested custom normals yet (due to the holidays) as soon as the working hours are normal (next week) we will review them

forgive me if I sound stupid, but are you using ofusion materials or normal materials?
If you're using oFusion Materials, try using standard max materials, and vice versa. I've noticed several differences when working with alphas via these two methods.

Another thing to try would be to recreate your materials. From the screenshot, it looks as though random faces have just gone black. I've had this happen to me, and it seems to fix up when I recreate the material.

forgive me if I sound stupid, but are you using ofusion materials or normal materials?
If you're using oFusion Materials, try using standard max materials, and vice versa. I've noticed several differences when working with alphas via these two methods.

Another thing to try would be to recreate your materials. From the screenshot, it looks as though random faces have just gone black. I've had this happen to me, and it seems to fix up when I recreate the material.

ofusion uses ofusion materials no matter what you do. ofusion display always displays ofusion materials, and if I am correct, it just converts max materials to ofusion materials when ofusion window is activated probably the same way you can convert regular materials to ofusion ones.

And in the end, it does not matter since it's the ofucion *.material script that's used as materials in ogre engine anyway.

@Lioric:

Alright, I'll be waiting again then. Thanks.

...

I've gotten my hopes up for a response over and over again now yet still nothing. I had no idea it takes so much time and effort to try out something like this, trying out custom normals in ogre viewport takes only a few minutes to see whether there is a problem with ofusion or the user.

All I've been asking is if it's something I am doing wrong and thus the custom normals work for everyone else who do it right, or whether it is ofusion bug. Lioric, please, which is it?

Well? I'm really in problems because of this, foliage looks bad without normal editing.

Why dont you just use a simple vertex shader for the trees, and replace all the normals to point upwards, that way lighting wont vary in the tree and ambient light is applied as normal (as the grass demo uses)

Why dont you just use a simple vertex shader for the trees, and replace all the normals to point upwards, that way lighting wont vary in the tree and ambient light is applied as normal (as the grass demo uses)

I don't want to replace all normals upwards. So you are saying that ofusion does not support and work with custom normals?