[Plugin] Fix Reversed Face Materials
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quoted "BUT don't let it become an excuse to be a sloppy modeler
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Amen, brother, Amen.
Of course, I am in denial. I never model sloppily
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Hi TIG, once again wonderful contribution to the SU community.
I gather you only select the faces you need reversed? Can't you already do that then context click and reverse face?
Please pardon my ignorance if I'm missing something.....
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Andrew,
As I understand it, this plugin reverses faces AND fixes materials that are applied to the back face...usually if you have materials applied to a back face and you reverse that face, the material stays with the back face and you have to reapply it to the corrected front face. Does that make sense? -
Thanks Mate, I see now. What I was hoping for was it would reverse multiple faces to to correct orientation. You can't rely on Orient face to sort out the I get into....
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It's NOT an "orient faces" tool.
The built in 'orient' plus 'reverse' is the best you'll get, and these will fail on edges with more than two faces, because then one face must be oriented wrongly relative to one of the others sharing that edge.
My tool[s] takes faces you have modeled [or inherited in an imported file] that have a texture applied/mapped and that look OK in Textured mode BUT that are actually made 'backwards' when viewed in Monochrome mode. Such faces will NOT import properly in most 3rd party renderers - they just do what you tell them to - the incorrectly oriented front-face has no material and faces away from the required direction anyway and the back-face is not usually given a material by the renderer either. Therefore I wrote this tool to flip any face that has a material on its back-side but not its front-side AND it also swaps the material over to to the front [you don't notice any change except in Monochrome mode]... You will then end up with all of the faces pointing in the same orientation and with their materials applied/mapped, so they look exactly as before. There is also a 'forced' version of the tool that flips a selected face, moves its back-material onto the front-face [properly mapped etc] and then deletes the then unused back-material [which had been formerly on the front-face!] -
This works very well. Thanks TIG, it saved me a ton of time on a recent project where I inherited a model that was poorly built.
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Maybe some little images for speed understand the concept ?
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Here's a simple example
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Thanks TIG, clear as crystal now....
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A black crystal
Faces are or are not well oriented
If they are false they must be reverse (material or not)
Then apply materialMaybe I miss something
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@unknownuser said:
A black crystal
Faces are or are not well oriented
If they are false they must be reverse (material or not)
Then apply materialMaybe I miss something
maybe you're just a little crazy my man.....
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Pilou - There is no way of knowing if a particular face is 'the wrong way round'. Especially if an edge has more than two faces.
The built-in 'Reverse' & 'Orient' will consistently arrange faces that are 'manifold', BUT if you have applied materials to a back-face then that won't flip onto the front-face.
This tool simply finds all selected faces that have a back-material but no front-material - it then can assume you have modeled them 'wrongly' and it reverses the faces and flips the back-material so it becomes the front-material. keeping the UV-mapping intact etc. This is important when 3rd party applications render the image exactly as you've exported it - i.e. most of them do not render the 'back-faces' at all - rendering only the front-face materials - which in such cases will be the 'wrong' side of the face!
This might well often look like an 'orient' operation - in the image example all faces do end up correctly oriented too - BUT 'orient' alone would not sort out the wrongly applied materials, as this tool does.
The tool's 'forced' option is similar, but that works even if a selected face with aback-material that has a front-material, reversing the face and using the back-material on the front-face instead and defaulting the back-material - because it is more 'dangerous' its sphere of operation is more limited... -
@unknownuser said:
This tool simply finds all selected faces that have a back-material but no front-material
That the Knot
In your image example walls have not thick, does the plug works also with thick walls ?
I suppose yes but...
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The tool works for any faces - as long as they only have a material on the back and not the front.
It simply reverses the face whilst leaving the materials in the same 'location' [orientation].
With an 'un-fixed' face - flick between Textured Mode and Monochrome Mode to reveal faces that are 'wrongly' oriented but have their materials on the back so look OK in the SKP-render BUT will fail in the external-renderers.
With a face that's 'fixed' it looks the same in the SKP 'Texture Mode', but it will then render properly in renderers [the Monochrome Mode should then show all faces oriented the same] -
Here's v1.4 http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=264134#p264134
It has an additional Tool 'Reverse Faces and Materials' - this reverses faces keeping their materials with correct UV-mapping - effectively turning the form 'inside out': if it is 'brick' outside and 'wood' inside with the 'back-faces' oriented to the 'outside', then using the tool reverses the faces so that the back-faces are oriented to the 'inside', AND now the 'wood' material will be on the 'outside' and the 'brick' material will be on the 'inside' - UV-mapping will have been correctly reapplied.
For example I recently had an imported OBJ object that had all some objects with faces reversed ['blue' outwards] and so their materials were mapped [correctly] on their 'insides'. Simply 'reversing' the faces failed to keep the UV-mapping on the new face orientations [on 'smoothed' surfaces it's especially problematical] - but this tools now solves that problem.
The included lingvo files have all been updated to match the changes. -
@tig said:
Note: Groups and Component-Instances that can have materials applied
directly onto them - then any faces within them that have the default-
material [front and/or back] will then appear to have that material applied
to them. In fact these faces within the Group/Definition will still have
the default-materials [front and/or back]. If you want to quickly remove
the appearance of this material on the back-faces within the group then
explode the group and immediately regroup the geometry - the group's
previous material will then be individually transfered to each face that
had the default-material. Now use this 'Delete Back-Materials' to delete
the unneeded back-material.Excellent plugin! Exactly what I have been waiting for.
I think I must be missing something with your above comment though. As you say if a group or component is textured with a material without first opening the group or component, all untextured faces, including the back faces, appear to be painted with that texture.
To fix the problem there is no need to ungroup and regroup as stated above. Simply select the default texture (either from the materials window or by sampling an untextured front or back face) then paint the unopened group or model. All untextures faces go back to untextured the way they should be.
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When I start Sketchup after installing the plugin I get the following error:
Error Loading File FixReversedFaceMaterials.rb
No such file to load -- deBabelizer.rbI checked the zip file and there is no such file in it. I found a copy in the Lattice Maker plugin but it should really be in this one as well.
Also what is the Sketchup8 link that is installed in the subfolder?
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@pmolsen said:
When I start Sketchup after installing the plugin I get the following error:
Error Loading File FixReversedFaceMaterials.rb
No such file to load -- deBabelizer.rb
I checked the zip file and there is no such file in it.
I found a copy in the Lattice Maker plugin but it should really be in this one as well.
Also what is the Sketchup8 link that is installed in the subfolder?Sorry about this... it is always the same 'deBableizer.rb' file... BUT I have now added it to the zip [ http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=264134#p264134 ] - it was packaged with the earlier zipped versions, but I missed it out of this one
I also managed inadvertently to add a shortcut linking to my copy of SUp v8 [luckily it's all public now anyway] - but that's now gone too !!! I just had a really bad day
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No problem, that shortcut was not dangerous
Many thanks, this is the best reversed-faces-plugin that I ever foundI saw, maybe you'd like to have a german translation
new german translation -
Thanks for the DE lingvo.
I'll include it in any future release - unless someone else wants to jump in with another version or comments...
My German is not up to much [as you probably noticed!]...
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