Vray and normals

[Yannick]

Hi,

is it possible to get Vray to be less sensitive with the normal orientation. It pains me to say that Mental Ray is not that picky,
Currently in order to have a file to render without any problem, every normal has to be properly oriented. When working with CAD data on object composed of thousand of parts, that is not possible.

Let me know.

Thanks,

Yannick

[vlado]

Can you get me an example file where this issue is apparent to vlado@chaosgroup.com?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Yannick]

Just to give you some examples:

AO is really picky and the double side option doesn't seem to help.
We had a tiled floor where every other row of tiles had there normal reverse, this was creating some problem when trying to catch the shadow with a wrapper material (the shadow only existed where the tile's normal was pointing outward.
Render element don't work if the normal are pointing inward (rawlight, rawshadow, matte shadow....)
Sometime objects render darker
Reflection (not so bad with the option "reflect on both side"

Yannick

[vlado]

Hm ok. Still, if you have particular example scenes, they will still be very useful.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Yannick]

I will find a scene for you.

[Metzger]

Take any set of headlights of a car from cad data. The normals on those are a pure nightmare to manage.. I can't think of a more perfect example. Also, I found with more recent builds of vray that even if you have a max refraction depth of 10 on your shader, you will need to override the max in globals to hit 10 rays for refraction.

[MoonDoggie]

A fix that sometimes works: Apply a shell modifier to the geometry, reselect and delete the original faces from the shell.

[Yannick]

A fix that sometimes works: Apply a shell modifier to the geometry, reselect and delete the original faces from the shell.

Shell modifier in Maya?

Vlado the file coming soon. I am just too busy at the moment.

[MoonDoggie]

bah, sorry didn't read the forum name. In Max this works sometimes.