Normal Editor workflow improvements

Hi,

I paste what I sent through an e-mail and was asked to post here :)

During my work with your plugin, I encountered issues that could be resolved by adding such features:

1. An option to preserve (lock) normals when removing a adjacent loop.
2. Resolve problems after mirror & flip (all normals are "randomly" split).
3. When rotating a selection, allow for local coordinates. The screenshot show current behaviour: you can't rotate all normals by their own Y axis, for example.
4. Function for flattening normals, like you would normally do with (S)cale -> 0.0.

Thanks for a great plugin!

1.


2.


3.

Hi!

1. An option to preserve (lock) normals when removing a adjacent loop.
2. Resolve problems after mirror & flip (all normals are "randomly" split).

This items can be qualified as Blender bugs, because all hard work related to mesh updates is done in the Blender kernel. I will make bug reports.

3. When rotating a selection, allow for local coordinates. The screenshot show current behaviour: you can't rotate all normals by their own Y axis, for example.

Good point. Will add this in TODO.

4. Function for flattening normals, like you would normally do with (S)cale -> 0.0.

You mean a feature like "Split Mode" -> "Restore" bound to a hotkey?

Adjustment.

1. An option to preserve (lock) normals when removing a adjacent loop.

Is not a bug. This is the right behavior.
Your issue can be solved with the "Copy From Mesh" button. Just make a copy of your mesh before deleting anything from it and copy normals from this mesh.

See the answer of the main developer of the normal editing feature.

Ответ на сообщение пользователя Alexander Romanov
You mean a feature like "Split Mode" -> "Restore" bound to a hotkey?

Big thanks for the rensponses and the bug report!
By flatten in 4. I mean calculating an average normal then setting it to all selected vertices.

What Oscar is trying to say in 4 is:
Left part of the image show normals where cap faces are done by "Face" Button.
To produce good normals for ring i had to add a loop in the middle, and copy/paste every vertex normal to its neighbour!! I know- I could do this here by second mesh, but this is only an example.
It would be cool if i could just said: make normals of these verticles planar on Z axis.

It would be cool if i could just said: make normals of these verticles planar on Z axis.

I think I understand: you want to make the projection of the normal on the plane, and want to do it like scaling. At the same time, the scaling would work as a rotation. It seems to me that this is a strange duplication of functionality. I think that if you want a functional of projection, it must be called somehow differently. But on the other hand, such an operation can be positioned as a "weighted" rotation. The higher the value for a particular axis, the stronger collinear normal. We will certainly take this into consideration.

It seems to me that this is a strange duplication of functionality.

You are right. I was just trying to explain :)

I just came with another suggestion!!!
Allow for "face" direction with "Split mode" together. Maybe I'm wrong but it could improve creating verticles normals where some normals are sharp and some are not, so they don't influence other faces. Like in the picture.
(To be honest i don't know if this is good, but creating normals like in the picture took me ages…)

Last question. Why cant we select few faces at one for "face" mode?

Allow for "face" direction with "Split mode" together

Maybe this would be useful improvement.

Last question. Why cant we select few faces at one for "face" mode?

Because there is undefined behavior for shared edges. Of course for split mode would no such problem.

Because there is undefined behavior for shared edges.

I thought common verticles shoud receive average.. Ok.
Big thx for great plugin. It's already ten times better than Blenders "Data Transfer".
Realy thanks for patience:)