When you create surfaces from curves using Loft or Sweep or any other tool, it would be nice to have an option to always have their “front” face the camera.
Right now, you have to more or less blindly flip curves and surfaces until you get a result that’s facing the direction you want.
This is important when you want to keep history around for certain object, and also when you’re exporting surfaces for visualization in other applications.
do you mean the surface normal?
if so, the normals usually face upwards or outwards, using planar surface. there are some commands that allow for a control of the normals depending on how you create it. like srfpt for instance when you create the edges cw the normals will face downwards or away ccw they will show up or towards you. the same with creating a light.
Not sure having the surface normals oriented according to the camera direction of the active viewport is a good idea. That would mean different results for different views with the same input geometry. IMO geometry creation methods should be absolute and not view dependent.
If you keep the _ShowDir box open during curves creation, you can flip any curve that comes out in the wrong direction before making the surface. that way you won’t loose history on flipping a curve later.
That history is lost over flipping is unfortunate.
It would be nice perhaps to have a toggle to always show direction, and also in the surface preview an option to show the direction .
In my experience, the surface normal follows the right hand rule, correct me if I am wrong, but if I make a edge srf for example, selecting the edges counter-clockwise, the surface normal ends up, if I select clockwise, it ends down.
I just did a random quick test with sweep2rails to see what happens. The green surface was with the green curve selected first, the red one with the red curve.
Both are the same curve but with flipped directions.
Selecting the green curve first and then the red and last the section was kinda selecting clockwise, and the surface ended up with the normal going down as expected.
Starting from the red curve, the selection was counter-clockwise and the final surface had its normal pointing up.
I did try changing the curve direction to see if the result was different, but the result was the same.
I don’t know if that is programmed like that or just a coincidence because of math, but I have been creating surfaces with this in mind for the past couple of years and it is like 90% correct, when the result is not as expected the surface ends up having some kind of problem later for joining with others requiring some fixing because span count or something similar.
there is a topic i created in an earlier life, nobody actually new about it then it seemed, so i guess its purely coincidental. though rectangular lights also follow the logic it is turned around there.
here a link the date is probably not right, i guess that has fallen victim to the big database blackout some years ago which deleted a lot of content on disco
