Question about lighting and surface normals

Troubleshooting graphics
1

Hello monkeyz, I have question about how surface normal direction affects lighting. I’m working with “showcase” type 3D models that are meant for rendering, not realtime viewing, and I need to wrestle them into shape for realtime viewing.

These models tend to have issues with surface normals pointing every which way. I figured out that importing the .3DS in the SDK and setting the face culling option to “Off” worked well for actually displaying the geometry on those faces which have surface normals pointing the wrong way, but these surfaces won’t pick up any light even if they are drawn, leading to weird black spots within the geometry.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Is there a simpler way of applying light to these faces other than manually selecting each piece of geometry and flipping the normals for that piece? If not, does anybody know how to do that in either 3D Studio or the JME SDK?

2

You need to fix that issue with the normals in a 3d model program. AFAIK there is nothing in the SDK to help out with this.

3

Without normals there can be no real time light.

4

Idk how to do it in 3D studio but there is surely a way to do it that’s a pretty common operation(google may know “recompute normals in 3DS max”)