Blender 3D - Turning on the Normals
Sunday, June 15 2008 - blender-3d, xna
One of the common problems that I am starting to see with models exported from Blender 3D into XNA Applications. With that in mind I thought I would throw this simple post together to show people how to turn on the normals display in Blender 3D.
First off you will need to make sure that you are in edit mode for the object. You can do this by Pressing 'TAB' on the Keyboard, or by Changing the 'Object Mode' drop down to 'Edit Mode'
Now on the Far right of the menu tab (The section on the bottom of the screen) you will see a Menu Tab like the one below.
Here you will see several buttons and sliders, the ones that I am interested in here are those relating to the Normals.
The two buttons here will turn on the display of the Models Normals, the first will show the face normals 'Draw Normals', and the second will show the Vertex Normals 'Draw VNormals'. Also if you find it hard to see the Normals shown, you can extend the size of the normals by changing the slider 'NSize'. In the next few images I will show both of the normals turned on.
In the Above images the first has no Normals, the Second has Face Normals, and the Third has Vertex Normals.
Now when modelling for XNA You need to make sure that before you export your models that all of the normals are pointing in the same direction, this way the exported faces will render with their face facing the direction you actually want them.
