RE: Question for OMB or anyone familiar with this warning message from CM3

[Legacy_Pstemarie]

               I'm reworking a tileset  and when I run it through CM3 I get several warnings on the WOK about "downward pointing faces." However, I can't see anything on the walkmesh geometry overtly out of whack. What exactly am I looking for so I can fix it?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Shadooow]

               

This means that one of the faces in the walkmesh is painted upside down.

 

Open the tile in max, hide everything but walkmesh and turn camera the mesh upside down - if you spot some face it is it

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               

thats my guess too. "downward pointing faces" sounds like a flipped normal.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Bannor Bloodfist]

               

Shadows reply is about the best way to find/fix the issue.

 

It requires everything but the wok to be hidden, then you look from beneath the wok, preferably directly as in 180degree from the top.  Meaning that you move your camera view directly under the wok and look directly upwards.  By default, NOTHING should be visible, IE no face should show normally from this view.  If you have a face that IS showing, that is likely the one that is failing in CM3. 

 

It can happen if you accidentally double face the object (wok) or have copy/pasted objects together to get your wok from copies of other objects etc, and missed a face here or there when deleting the extras and attaching everything together. That is typically how I generate a wok, I just duplicate objects and attach them, then delete the faces I don't need, also remembering to weld all the verts of course '>  The double face can happen fairlly easily is you are using Veltools as it has a button or three that will do that sort of thing for you automatically but they can also easily be hit when you didn't intend to do so.

 

Other instances of something like this is where are particular face is actually overhanging, IE a backwards sloped wall type of thing.

 

P.S.  CM3's error report used to tell you exactly what face on what object was causing the issue... at least I thought it did I may be thinking of the sanity checks for that though.  I know that the wok sanity check will tell you exactly where it breaks by face number or vert number.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldMansBeard]

               

Yes, you get that warning if the face normal is pointing anywhere below the horizontal.

 

It will list the faces in the full log but not in the summary log - remember face and vert numbers are offset by 1 in Max,

 

Faces that are just upside-down duplicates of other faces are eliminated automatically and don't trigger the warning.

 

Looking from directly underneath will spot most other cases except if it is a very slight overhang that would be hard to see that way. The option to "Repair aabb Overhangs" should catch most of those, though, unless it's a really perverse model. Otherwise, if you are still getting the warning, it's most likely a spurious bit of mesh with its own verts.

 

Have fun.

 

OMB

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Pstemarie]

               

Thanks everyone - I was sure that's what it was, but just needed confirmation. Thanks OMB for the tip about running with "fix overhang" ticked to operate.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <drawing...>


In addition to the above, in Max with only WOK showing, edit faces, highlight all faces and turn on "show normals" Set your normal length to some preposterous length and the downward-facing faces will jump out at you regardless of how big/hidden it is.


<...a line>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               

If I remember correctly Clean Models also displays the number of the face(s) that is pointing downwards. If you got the number of the face you can let (g)Max evaluate a short script: setFaceSelection $ #(n)

where n is the number of the face and the face will be selected if you have selected 'Face' in the Modify tab.

If there's more than one face that needs to be corrected and some of them need to be removed (because of double faces for example), start with the face with the highest number because the numbers will change after a face is removed.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_cervantes35]

               

I also have a question about CM3 OMB if a trimesh node is say fragmented into several parts will this cause shadow issues and is there a good way to fix it, other than remodeling the whole trimesh node?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldMansBeard]

               

I also have a question about CM3 OMB if a trimesh node is say fragmented into several parts will this cause shadow issues and is there a good way to fix it, other than remodeling the whole trimesh node?

 

I'd say, it won't normally cause shadow problems, so it shouldn't be necessary to fix it. But can you give a specific example, that you are worried about?