View Face Normals in Mesh workspace

[robduarte]

The ability to view face normals seems like a really basic feature that's needed for the Mesh workspace. I'm thinking of the way that Meshlab shows them as lines projecting outward for each face: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-p4mPZzOLYVM/V1A_ChX3h9I/AAAAAAAAAsA/TzfOggVLngQ_sWkq6veJrRnX16XG7...

[roambotics_scott]

I suspect this is a symptom of trying to hide complexity and do things magically without actually building something that can reliably manage that

[robduarte]

I think if it was about removing complexity (and hiding the existence of face normals?) then there wouldn't be a "Reverse Normals" command in there. It's just that currently the only way to tell which way a face is "facing" is to notice that it's a different color (ie: it doesn't have an appearance applied to it). One problem with that is that this only works if you're using one of the "shaded" visual styles (not wireframe). Also, I think it could be hard to spot the brown face when you have thousands of faces on a body. Honestly a better option for this would be to have a command that highlights reversed faces in red (another option in Meshlab), rather than turning on the face normal arrows for every face. Sometimes that just turns your model into a big hairball. 🙂

[felix.uhl]

@robduarte even this doesn't work anymore, materials are now applied on both sides of meshes 😅

I would like to know which direction the normals point. Under the INSPECT section, there could just be an option to turn off two-sided rendering, that would be enough for simple mesh debugging purposes.

Showing reversed faces would also be a cool feature but more effort to implement.