Face plugin question
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Hi everyone just want to ask about a plugin that can automatically orient faces of a model inward or outward? I just downloaded a 3ds model and the faces are facing in different directions. thanks for the help
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Here is an "automatic face reverser" by Didier:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=5333
and a "brush like" tool by Tomasz:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=13380 -
Alternatively I'd simply shortcut the
ReverseandOrienttools [select a face first to see these as available commands inWindow > Preferences > Shortcuts]. I'd use say Q+shift and Q+shift+alt.
The you can quickly edit a form. Select a face, Q+shift flips it over, it stays selected, Q+shift+alt to orient all connected faces the same way as it s now; or select several faces and Q+shift to flip them all at once etc etc...
The problem with any automated fix is deciding which is 'the inside' and which is 'the outside'; also edges with more that two faces will always make one connected face wrongly oriented compared to another - you must then fix it manually anyway...
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I've thought about a plugin that would try and identify which faces are reversed. If you had a convex volume as a group you could make sure all face normals point towards the center of the group. Another approach would be for a face to look at all adjacent faces and look at their face orientation and would match them if they were all the same. Some things would sneak through the crack with this (e.g. multiple bad faces side by side), but this would work on non-convex volumes.
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It's easy to make a shape with 'all' concave faces that you want to face 'outside' so it'd fall over at the first hurdle
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