I’m making a modular character with separated body parts like head, torso, arms, legs, etc. The problem i have is that after detaching body part, edges are changing their normals and transition between separated parts is very noticeable:
How do you deal with things like this?
This happens because of the vertex normals facing a different direction.
Might be possible to solve this with a Normal modifier. No guarantee.
Usually this kind of stuff is taken care of by carefully planning your character.
These seams could be covered by cloth or armor if the character has some.
Depending on what program you’re using you would need to set up Explicit Normals, that means that the direction that the vertices are facing won’t change. In 3ds Max, you would apply an Edit Normals modifier on the complete mesh before splitting it apart, then you would select all of the normals and click Make Explicit.
After that, you need to make a copy of the mesh for each part you want to separate, then in each you would go in and delete the part of the mesh that you don’t want. You can’t select a part and detach it, it will mess up the explicit normals that way, you can only delete parts of it which is why you have to do the multiple copies thing.
Had exactly same problem with my character, got around it. I’m working on 3D Studio Max and long time ago I discovered that Scripts are always the savior. No idea if Maya can handle scripts or plugins, but for THAT particular problem there is a script for Max - Vertex Normals Stitcher by Budi G on ScriptSpot. Completely free.
As for Maya, you need to find a way yourself. But, what ^they^ said, vertex normals is what you want to edit.
Thanks for the replies, i’ll fiddle around with it and fix those seams.
