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Shady goings on with a gmax model.

I

Ian P

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unitedkingdom
Hi folks.

Having temporarily given up on the Kubelwagen transparency issues after many hours of fruitless poking and prodding, I've gone back to another problem that's baffling me. Hopefully someone here will have a clue.

The problem is that (apart from the fact that I'm utterly clueless), I'm not a particularly good modeller, so I gave up and purchased a very cheap mesh of a Flakvierling AA gun from TurboSquid.

The mesh itself is nice and, apart from some scaling issues and some degenerate poly warnings which I'm studiously ignoring on advice from those more knowledgeable than myself, I was easily able to export it to mdl and get it into the sim. The problem is that a couple of the polys - the central "hub" of the gun and one of the shields - are considerably darker, visually, than the rest of the model.

Amongst my various fiddles, I deleted the darker gun shield and duplicated the "correctly coloured" one, so that problem is a bit moot, but the central section remains steadfastly much darker than the rest.

The mesh was originally in 3DS, which I am unable to view without importing it to Gmax plus, being a commercial mesh (albeit a dirt cheap one), obviously I can't upload it and say "here, poke at this", but does anyone have any idea what might cause this and how to remedy it?

Thanks,

Ian P.
 

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Hi Ian,

Would might want to check if the normals are set correctly for those polygons. Having wrong normals can result in weird shading. You could let MCX display the normals.

That would be the first thing I would check. Else you could also verify if the materials used are correct. Maybe some polygons have a different material?
 
Hi Arno,

Thanks for your reply.

The materials have all been replaced, as they were "normal" and are now all FSX materials - the dark and light components both have the same same material applied, with the same texture, so it isn't that as far as I can tell.

Regarding normals, they all appear to be pointing "outwards" when examined using face or polygon select. When I try and invert them, they obviously get turned inside-out as the face selected goes transparent.

I've actually identified three components that remain displaying darker than the rest. Two of them are "lines", presumably drawn using splines? The third is a box object, so that doesn't move me any further forward either, unfortunately.

I've also been back, imported the original model and immediately exported it, unmodified. That displays the same problem and there are no obvious different settings between, for instance, the left and right shields. I wonder if a modifier has been applied, then the stack collapsed back? I just wish I knew what the modifier was!

Cheers,

Ian P.
 
That's because the modeler used the infamous "Mirror" button the the toolbar to create the abnormal part.

While it looks "fine" in both Max and GMax, in the sim the "normals" have a value of -1 (which is inverted shading!).

The way to "fix" this would be to select the part in GMax, add an X-Form modifier, then a "mirror modifier." Collapse back to e-mesh or e-poly, export and check it out in the sim.

If that fails to "fix" the problem, revert to the original part, add a "mirror modifier" to the stack, the click on the "Mirror" button on the top toolbar.

If that fails, then select all of the parts from the left side of the gun (barrels included!), Clone as Copy, then add a "mirror modifier" to the stack, export and check in the sim.
 
Hi Bill,

Yep, that was spot on. I spoke to Ron (RAZBAM) while waiting to see if anyone else responded and he was able to help me with the problem within a few minutes - although his method was to reset the XForm and then flip the polys back to face outwards, which achieved the same end.

Thanks for your help gents!

Ian P.
 
I have also noticed when welding vertices sometimes, a wall can get darker shaded. This happens now and then, when using booleeans to form the mesh. A poly can get degraded. When I want to fix a wall for example, I can also not use a spline converted to mesh. Better off making a new box, then take off one of the walls.

Have a feeling I get this shading after booleen operations, because a vertice gets an angle or something...

Cheers,
:stirthepo
 
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