Normals Adjustments

Table of Contents

The Normal Toolkit Normals Adjustments tab regroups some of the essential tools for adjusting your object’s normals and your object’s soft/hard edges.

Set Normal Angle #

Clicking this button will change the appearance of shaded polygons to render with a softened and hardened appareance based on the angle between the two faces sharing the edge.

Use the slider or enter a value to set the angle. Edges with shared face angle greater than the slider value will be hardened. Edges with shared face angle smaller than the slider value will be softened.

Works on any component types or with whole objects.

Right Click Menu

  • Reset: Reset angle to the default value.
  • Set as default value: Set the current angle as the default value when using the Reset button.
  • Soften Edge Only: Works like Set Normal Angle but will not harden any edges.
  • Harden Edge Only: Works like Set Normal Angle but will not soften any edges.
  • Select All Edge Below Angle: Select all the selected object’s edges with a shared face angle smaller than the Angle value.
  • Convert To Edge Below Angle: Select edge which shared face angle is smaller than the angle value, but only the edges currently selected.

Interface Hotkeys

  • Middle Mouse Click: Set the current angle value to 0. If at 0, reset to the default angle value.
  • Shift + Left Click: Run Soften Edges Only function.
  • Ctrl + Left Click: Run Harden Edges Only function.

Soften Edge #

Manipulates vertex normals to change the appearance of shaded polygons to render with a softened appearance. Soften Edge sets the Normal angle to 180 degrees, making all selected edges render soft.

Works on any component types or with whole objects.

Right Click Menu

  • Convert To Soft Edges: Select only the soft edges in the current selection.
  • Select All Soft Edges: Select all soft edges from the selected objects.

Interface Hotkeys

  • Middle Mouse Click: Run Select All Soft Edges function.
  • Shift + Left Click: Run Convert To Soft Edges function.

Harden Edge #

Manipulates vertex normals to change the appearance of shaded polygons to render with a hardened appearance. Harden Edge sets the Normal angle to 0 degrees, making all selected edges render hard.

Works on any component types or with whole objects.

Right Click Menu

  • Convert To Soft Edges: Select only the hard edges in the current selection.
  • Select All Soft Edges: Select all hard edges from the selected objects.

Interface Hotkeys

  • Middle Mouse Click: Run Select All Hard Edges function.
  • Shift + Left Click: Run Convert To Hard Edges function.

Conform #

Unifies the direction of the surface normals for a selected polygon mesh.
The resulting direction of the surface normals will be based on the direction that is shared by the majority of the faces on the mesh.

Reverse #

Reversing the face normal on a polygon face switches the “front” and “back” facing direction of the face.
Vertex normals are usually computed from the face normals, so they are affected as well.

Works on any component types or with whole objects. Works on locked or unlocked vertex normal.

  • It will also set the Opposite flag to false in the Render Stats of the object(s).

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