Shaders look good only when normals are reveresed

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone, not sure if this is the right part of the forum to send this as I don't really know what is causing this problem. I have a model of a mech with left and right limbs, which were created by dublicating special with scale on -1. I have reversed the normals so they would point outside. When I got to shading, it appeared that if I apply the same shader to both right and left limbs, the shader would only look normal if I reverse the normals so they would point inside and the object would appear black in the viewport. Though the original object looks fine shaded as it is.

If I try to reverse the normals as they should be and apply the shader they look identical to the original. It is a bit inconvenient to work with though, since they appear black in the viewport. Any ideas what went wrong and how to fix it?

Thanks for any input on the issue

[Anonymous]

I discovered something else, on this image you can see that the geometry in question has normals facing out, but it's still black.

And if I reverse the geometry like the lower piece, you can still see some normals sticking out, but not as many as when I turn it inside out.

[damaggio]

There could be other issues here prok, try to unlock normals and set a new softing angle, also does the piece have Uvs and does it render properly?

If it has uvs make sure it has only one UV set under Uv Editor >uv sets....map 1

And shader is compatible with Viewport 2.0.

[Anonymous]

Hey Damaggio,

Thanks for your reply. Uv's are perfectly fine. Everything renders well, only when the object appears black in the viewport. It has a darker shade when I render it when it looks fine in the viewport. On the other side of the Mech I have the same geometry which works, it shows up right both in the viewport and render.

Can you please explain a bit more about what you mean by softing angle?

[damaggio]

If you go to Normals , there's a bunch of options there that are very useful and need to be understood, sometimes models from the internet might come in with normals all messed up and you gonna need to fix then either by reversing them, unlocking, softening or hardening...take a look at this old video...still explains the basics of it and when u have a chance take a read about them in the help docs.

here.....https://vimeo.com/2165443

[Anonymous]

Thanks, but normals look absolutely fine and everything renders fine, only thing is that the object looks black in the viewport. Must be something just broken in the file.