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Thursday, February 3, 2011

Displaying face normals on Cheetah3D

I was idling away today when all of a sudden I had a sudden inspiration for a short screencast demonstrating a technique in Cheetah3D for displaying the direction of face normals. Other packages have specific options and tools for this, but Cheetah3D so far has only a user-created script that performs that job. However, the script generates a "frozen" set of lines that don't really update with the model. In my technique, the direction of the lines and how many are shown is updated automatically. You can find the link for this screencast here.

A couple more things. This screencast was created with Jing. What a great tool it is! I'm sure I'll be using it more often. It's a great introductory tool for creating tutorials and just plain getting the point across in a very direct way.

Also, I'd like to add one more link to a tutorial created by Dave Ellis based on an idea of mine. It's the kind of simple but powerful technique that I like, the kind of stuff that makes your modeling and rendering day so much nicer :)

2 comments:

  1. Thank you. Having moved from another program this was one of the questions I was going to have to ask.

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  2. You're welcome! Glad you found it useful :)

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