WIP Blender normals
The major trouble people get when making a 3d objects for x-plane in blender, is most off time a trouble with invisible face or black edge on face cross section
This trouble can easily be fixed, and blender have the tools to help you avoid this trouble for future work
Now you have to find them
» At first the main trouble came from the blender 3d view window, by default the blender 3d views show the objects in double sided mode.
Look at this image to see where to found the button,
this mode have nothing related with x-plane, it is just for the blender 3d windows only, so click on that button will not make the face double sided in the obj exported for the flight sim, that will be only a help in the blender 3d window
This image show you the difference between the two mode,
notice that the left object show the black part, and that easy to know where the face normal pointing out,
on the right one the object is more visible, but it is impossible to know if we got a normal inverted here.
So it is a good thing to think about put this button off, for working 3d objects with x-plane, you can put the object back to double sided to help you model thing, but put it off when you have finish to look at the normals results
» But sometime you will need to put the double sided ON, to be able to model easily, for that in EDIT mode, we have a tool to show where the normals point out
As soon you click on the Draws normals button, we can see in the 3d view window, in edit mode, the little blue line that starting at the face location and pointing outside.
That a easy way to know where the normals pointing, and like that you can let the double sided button Off all the time
» Now we know how to locate the bad normals on a objects and we need to make the correction to get our face normals like we want
For that we got some tool or function to flip them, blender get two way to do that.
- The function: Recalculate normals outside & Recalculate normals inside
This is the one most people will use, because it can be userd on all the mesh object in one time, but that function get a limitation, it will not work on a simple face, or any face that is not merged on others ones.
How to use it, is simple, select all the faces off the objects, and tape in the 3d view window, CTRL + N to get the Recalculate normals outside, and CTRL + SHIFT + N to get the Recalculate normals inside - The function: Flip
This one will be really useful when working on objects that get sometime trouble to fix normals with the previous function, you can select one or more faces and ask blender to flip the normals.
How to access this function, in edit mode inside 3d view windows tape W>Flip normals
Now all that function can be found in the 3d view header button, you don’t have to use the shortcut keyboard to use them (you will not be able to remember all them when starting learning blender)
Look in the 3d view windows header, and in the edit mode, the menu Mesh>Normals
Conclusion:
If you get trouble with normals, keep the blender 3d views function to show the mesh double sided will not help you at all, first thing to do in blender before trying to recalculate normals, will be to put it OFF
Lot of trouble will be solved, simply by being visible in the 3d views
