Enhancing backface visibility

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aubrey

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Enhancing backface visibility

Greetings!

While correcting the normals of a mesh, I am experiencing difficulty in visually differentiating between faces and backfaces. From certain angles, faces and backfaces look identical - forcing me to constantly orbit around the model in order to distinguish them - which is significantly inhibiting my efficiency. The "Backface Culling" style would be perfect for me, except that as I see in a previous thread, the ability to select culled faces was removed in a previous version.

What are my options for making backfaces easier to identify so that I can flip their normals?

Thanks,

-Aubrey
 
Did you check whether you have the "Light both sides" option on? If so, turn it off, that will help. Otherwise, try adding a color texture (no specular) to the model, that sometimes helps with the contrast.
 
Thanks for the reply!

Yes - I have "light both sides" enabled. The existence of the option really constitutes my problem: surface lighting is dependent on the viewing angle, making it a poor way to visually indicate backfaces. It's fine if you are dealing with basic shapes, but when you are working in tiny spaces with lots of faces at many angles (such as a spaceship turbine :)) it doesn't work at all.

Here's an illustration of what I mean:
The mesh in the pics has a solid color material applied, but I have tested this with every combination of lighting and materials I could think of and nothing really helped.

Sample backface:

picture3kq.png


Exact same scene, camera slightly lower:
Backface now looks identical to other faces

picture2gz.png
picture2gz.png


Backface Culling Enabled:
This would be the perfect solution, except that I can't select the face to flip it...

picture4er.png

picture4er.png
 
well its not neat, but in polygon mode with none selected and cam light on choose flip normals, every face with normal towards cam will turn darker, the reversed brighter, then you flip again (best to have it as a hotkey).
 
Last edited:
Hi Podperson!
Greetings from the Unity forums - looks like I'm in good company here :)

Good idea Archie - that combined with backface culling works for me 'till PodPerson's request gets implemented.
 
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