Search Unity

  1. Megacity Metro Demo now available. Download now.
    Dismiss Notice
  2. Unity support for visionOS is now available. Learn more in our blog post.
    Dismiss Notice

Mirroring objects causes inverted normals

Discussion in 'Formats & External Tools' started by Paulius-Liekis, Mar 4, 2010.

  1. Paulius-Liekis

    Paulius-Liekis

    Joined:
    Aug 31, 2009
    Posts:
    672
    Hi,

    I mirrored some objects in 3dsMax, which causes inverted normals in Unity. Of course if I look into scale in 3dsMax I can see it has -100% on X axis, which causes problems with normals. The negative scale caused me some problems with animation in 3dsMax too, so I did "reset scale" which fixed negative scale (and problem with animation in 3dsmax), but I still get inverted normals in 3dsMax.

    I know some people have suggested inverting normals in 3dsMax, but that would lead to two problems:
    1) I wouldn't be able to use instancing while doing a mirror copy
    2) It would look wrong in 3dsMax

    So...is there a proper workaround for this?

    Regards,
    Paulius
     
  2. Tysoe

    Tysoe

    Joined:
    Jul 6, 2009
    Posts:
    577
    I use mirror quite often and havent had this problem. Have you tried adding a edit mesh mofifier to the top of the stack and resseting Xforms, then collapsing the stack.

    I haven't had to use the last couple of steps in unity yet, but it's not uncommon in other engines.

    Another thing to do when scaling to avoid export problems is to select a subobject mode like vertices or faces and perform the scale in there. then flip the normals in the face subobject mode. This lets you use uniform scale without messing up the scale when exporting.


    It's unfortunate that unity currently imports models from a lot of apps with the wrong handedness. so you have to jump through these hoops to get the correct orientation. Can be quite a headache for us artists.

    It was suggested by the Unity devs to vote in the unity feedback page to hopefully get this fixed. You can do so at:

    http://feedback.unity3d.com/forums/...orrect-orientation-and-without-game?ref=title

    It's currently at 39th place.