Mesh Layer Ops

Edge Weight Pie

A pie menu that gives quick access to setting discrete Crease weights to the edge selection. There is a nested submenu for Bevel Weight if that’s more your speed.

Note

  • Bind to a key in the addon Preferences in the Mesh context.

VNormal Kit

_images/vnorms.jpg

Panel for VNormal Kit

VNormal Kit is an interface to setting custom vertex normals based on the selection set membership of faces and sharp edges.

In order to use this tool, you must first ensure that Auto Smooth is enabled for the mesh. Also, any hard edges produced by a lower angle threshold will be preserved when using the VNorms tools. So if you don’t want that, be sure to set it to 180.0.

Vertex normals (also called Slip Normals Data) are computed in up to three passes using three selection sets respectively. Each pass iterates through all vertices and calculates the Split Normal data by only considering neighboring faces that are members of that set. If a vertex is not a member of a face, then it will not get a Split Normal.

  • You can add a face to a selection set by making a face selection and pressing the + button for one of the three selection sets.

  • Pressing the - button will clear selected faces from the set.

  • Pressint the ++ button first clears set membership for all visible faces (for the relevant selection set row) and then adds the selected faces to the selection set.

  • Pressing one of the SEL# buttons will select faces that are members of that set.

  • Pressing the APPLY button will compute the Split Normals data for each selection set in order.

  • Toggling the Area Weights button will weigh generated Split Normals based on the surface area of neighboring faces.

So, what faces get added to selection sets? First let’s define the problem: We want to make sure that edges and corners (even sharp ones) are slightly rounded. We also want smooth contiguous surfaces to have defined boundaries and the area between boundaries to have a nice transition. Thus, we assign each boundary to the same selection set and exclude a trim of faces between each boundary (or loop of sharp edges). When we compute the Split Normals by pressing APPLY the result will be smooth shading within surfaces and a nice transition between each surface. We can refine the shading of each surface by giving some faces membership to the other selection set. The video below demonstrates some simple and more complex cases:

Note

  • Accessible from the rmKit-MeshLayers section of the tools panel.