Incorrect Normals / Broken Normals with some random parts/bricks

[virtualrepublic]

I have some problems with incorrect normals after importing to BLENDER. Asking the creator of the original parts "Philo" from LDRAW said that this should be an importer issue.

This is visible in the viewport and also in the renderings with Luxology MODO especially when using Sub Surface Scattering. Maybe there's a method to fix it in BLENDER. I did not find any. Neither in MODO.

Here you'll see the issue (dark parts):
Screenshot BLENDER
Screenshot MODO

3667_Bakery_LDR.zip
3667_Bakery_BLENDER.zip

[BertVanRaemdonck]

The problem usually lies in part geometry Blender doesn't particularly like. There are some parts in which faces overlap but the vertices don't join, usually caused by working with elaborate primitives in the .dat files. Problems occur also when there's a vertex on the edge of another face, but it's not really connected to it because there's no corresponding vertex on that other face. These features tend to confuse the "recalculate normals" Blender function the script uses to produce nice meshes. The way I see it, there are two options to fix this in the script. 1) somehow connect those semi-loose vertices to the edges/faces they're touching. 2) don't rely on the recalculate normals function, but interpret the LDraw normal commands in the script itself.

To fix it for your renders, I think the only options is to fix everything manually. With the "link bricks" feature, however, you'll only have to do it once for each part (as long as they're the same material, so you might want to change that first) making it much quicker.

[virtualrepublic]

Thanks for the reply.