I have a mesh with some faces that are flipped (normals pointing away) and in Maya it produces the effect I’m looking for. That is light hits those faces differently then the other faces(normals pointing the “right” way). But when I import (fbx) that mesh to UE4 those faces are see through. I know the faces are still there because I can go into my object and see the faces with normals pointing to me but then the other ones become invisible. Does anyone know what I can do to show both sides of the face? or to have the same lighting effects?
Thanks for the response!, I will try when I get home from work but I guess you cant achieve this effect without having a material on your mesh?, I thought this would be a lighting or mesh property
Could you probably post a picture of the effect that you want to achieve, because atm I dont know exactly what you like? The upper “solution” will just put a material on both sides of e.g a plane (normally a plane is invisble at one side, with the “two sided” enabled, it will also display the mat on the backface -> so it’s not invisible anymore)
I will upload a picture later on tonight but right now I cant find an example. But basically the planes that have the normals reversed receive less light so it makes the certain parts of the mesh look darker. I’m guessing its because the planes receive some light but not as much as the ones with the correct normals.
When you have flipped normals and two-sided on - it renders lighting for the back side of the plane and copies it to the front. So in your current set up - most of the light is hitting the front of the surface, and very little on the back of the surface. This is why the planes with flipped normals look darker. However, if your object were backlit (meaning the back of the surface gets more light than the front) - your planes with flipped normals will end up being much brighter than the planes around them.
My gross generalization would be “you’re playing with fire” but I’m interested to know if you’ve found a good use case for flipped normals.
Double sided material achieved what I wanted to do ! thanks !
Optical - I’m working on a low poly game and one method to create a certain look is to flip normals of every other face. The result is: ://forum.unity3d/attachments/wip11-jpg.100575/
That screenshot sure is pretty! I can’t help but cringe at the possible vertex count though. If you have unique normals for each face, won’t you have unique vertices for each triangle?
@Denny:
yes, but Im fairly certain that he just has unsmoothed normals on everything. so vert count shouldnt be increased at all, in comparison to globally smoothed normals.
The upper “solution” will just put a material on both sides of e.g a plane (normally a plane is invisble at one side, with the “two sided” enabled, it will also display the mat on the backface -> so it’s not invisible anymore)