Hi everyone, I’m new here. I’d like to know how I could create a “view display mode” that gives me the normals of objects.
I want this:
do you like each direction of the surfaces to appear in a different colour or what is the purpose? you can set the backface to appear in a different colour just set the backface setting to custom material or single colour. but that would only show the direction of the normals then generally and not in 3d space.
there is still an option to set the lights in the display mode to custom and give them a direction and a colour, i have not much experience with it but it appears you might get something similar looking though it seems to depend on the angle of view also. not sure if that is helpful for you
this is the mac interface though it will look a bit different on windows.
Hi Andres -
The TestShowNormalMap command might work for you.
-wim
nice, that basically does the same as custom lighting in that case also depended on the direction of view, i just cant understand the usage of it, what would that be for? (maybe i should not be asking dumb questions.. not quite awake yet)
Hi WIm, the TestShowNormalMap overlay only appears in Rendered display mode. If i want to do this in GH, via python code, it seems simple—just set the viewport to “Rendered” and run the command—but in practice, doing both in the same script/Grasshopper solve doesn’t always work. Sometimes Rhino needs a viewport refresh before the normal map overlay will show up, so you often end up toggling twice or they are out of sync: once to set the display mode, once to trigger the overlay.
Even with extra logic to remember and restore the display mode, my solution still isn’t 100% flawless—there’s a bit of a timing/refresh quirk. If you have tips on making this totally robust (single toggle = always works), I’d love to hear them! Or provide a code that does this 
attach my quirky attempt
show_normals_python.gh (14.1 KB)