The options in the Part/Normals Control section let you edit and rebuild the normal vectors on a part. This process often solves flipped normals and badly formed normals that are common in lower quality data.
The term "normal" refers to an imaginary line that is drawn from the center of the part at right angles to the surface. The software uses normals to determine a surface's orientation to light sources.
Part/Normals Control:
- Rebuild Normals. Rebuilds and optimizes the entire part mesh, destroying and recreating all normals in the process.
Select a mode:
- Faceted. Rebuilds normals with hard edges between the polygons. Set the Angle to choose how sharp of an edge to maintain.
- Smooth. Rebuilds normals with a blended joint between polygons,
yielding a softer surface description.
- Repair Normals. Tries to repair existing normals without modifying the original vertices.
The Faceted and Smooth modes do not have any affect when you select Repair Normals. The result is always smooth.
- Select Part to Split. Lets you extract individual surfaces from the part for greater flexibility with appearance assignment or animation.