Maya 2017 Update 5 Average Normals Command not working as expected

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone,

I am experiencing the following problem:

Here is the basic object that I perform the operation on

When I average the vertex normals I expect them to shoot off at equal angles relative to all edges irrespective of their length. Instead I get this:

And no setting that I've tried in the command options seems to make a difference. Smoothing the edges seems to introduce even more bias towards the longer edges. What is going on and why is this happening?

Thank you

[damaggio]

That's normal behavior if you have a cube with soft normals, just harden edges and it will disappear Mesh Display>Normal>Hard edges

[Anonymous]

That's the thing, I don't need hard edges, I need the averaged vertex normals to ignore edge bias for the purposes of their angle. My actual model is not a cube and it's precisely a cube where the command doesn't cause any issues as mentioned in this thread, since all sides are already equal.

Also, why does averaging vertex normals lock them?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Here's an answer from polycount:

Select your object then:
Attribute Editor - Shape Node - Mesh Controls Rollout - Vertex Normal Method (Angle and Area Weighted - Default)

AUTODESK get this stuff into your documentation. Not a word about it on your Average normals documentation page.