Process Normals

Table of Contents

If your bevels are already done on your object, you can use the Process Normals to weight your vertex normals correctly. All you have to do is to add to the Normal Toolkit Selection Sets all the faces that should not have any influence on the normals alignment (generally, it would be the bevel faces).

Using Process Normals #

Select at least one object with bevels, or create the bevels on the object.
Make sure the object has soft edges everywhere you want your normals to be smooth.
Select the beveled faces and add them to the Selection Set. (This step is not required if you used the Smart Bevel and ticked Add To Selection Set in the Smart Bevel options)
  • You can use the Select Similar tool to match your beveled faces selection on identical objects.
Click on Process Normals and the tool will align all the vertex normals using influence from the Selection Set.
  • For additional precision, you can also use an additional set, the Fillet Set.

Process Normals Options #

You can customize a few settings for the Process Normals through the Process Normals Options window.

Use Improved Process #

If for any reasons you wish to use the legacy Process Normals which works without the Normal Toolkit plugin, it is still available in the Process Normals Options by unchecking Use Improved Process.

Weighted Hard Edge Intersections #

This option allows to create weighted bevels without needing extra supporting faces.

When enabled, after processing your object’s normals, the tool will check for any hard edges between two bevel faces from the Selection Sets. When a hard edge is found, it will orient the vertex normals of the edge as opposite vectors thus giving a nice seam look to your inseted bevels.

  • Make sure that the edges surrounding the beveled faces are soft and that the interior edges are hard to get proper results.

Override Vertex Normal Method #

When processing the normals of your objects, your object current Vertex Normal Method have an influence on the outcome of the weighted normals. If you wish, you can tell the tool to ignore the object’s Vertex Normal Method and it will act as if it was set to Unweighted.

For objects that are entirely composed of soft edges, you would generally want to set the Vertex Normal Method to Unweighted (or enable the override) so that the vertex normals are strictly managed by the Process Normals function.

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