Change direction of normals

[yellowcab]

Hi,

I would like to change the direction of these normals so that they run parallel to the white vertical edges. The picture below is of a chair leg. My goal is to extrude the red polygons in the same direction as the chair leg.

Normals

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[yellowcab]

OK, I have almost figured out how to do it. I select the normals in the "edit normals" modifier. Then I rotate the normals on the Z axis. However, I still don't know how to "save" the normals so that they remain pointed in the desired direction.

Edit Normals

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Noren2]

I don't think that changing the actual normal direction is the best solution, here, as it might lead to problems down the line. You could scale the slanted  edges (with the option for using individual pivots) to move the bottom down that way. If there are internal vertices in your bottom facing polygons, you'd probably have to create them new, so deleting the bottom facing polygons would make sense and then you could also use one of the various border extension scripts available.

You could also align a user grid to one of the slanting sides of the leg and move the bottom according to that.

So basically one solution would be moving instead of extruding (you could extrude by 0 first if you don't want to cut and need an additional segment.)

[yellowcab]

Hi,
thanks for your reply. I would like to change the direction of the bottom normals so that I can move the bottom polygons in the same direction as the chair leg (local coordinate system). Afterwards I could use constrain to edge and move the vertices up to z=0. This way I could have a chair leg bottom that is parallel to the floor and sits on the floor.

[Noren2]

Hi yellowcab, I'm not sure what to make of your reply, but maybe I wasn't clear enough. I understand what you are trying to do, but in my opinion changing the vertex normals is not the way to go about that, so I've given you some alternate options to achieve what you want to do. Have you considered those options or do you need some further clarification on any of them?

[yellowcab]

I need further clarification on all of them.

[Noren2 · Accepted solution]

You can scale up the edges marked in thick red using the pivot mode seen in the icon marked in red on the right. They then  should scale up like the edges drawn in in thin red and you can go from there.

You'd have to delete and redo the faces marked in cyan, though, if there are any internal vertices.

You can use a script like this to extend the borders if the cyan faces have been deleted. No need to insert any angle, the surrounding faces should be extended according to their angles by default. There are various options for this online, perhaps even a script to do an extrusion like you wanted directly.

You can align a User Grid to the face marked in pink. If you don't know how to use/align/activate a user grid, please google that.