Hi there. I’ve been scratching my head for a while about the fact that maya seems to automatically normalize vertex normals. Doesn’t seem to matter much if i use the set normal tool, bake from another data set(like vertex color), or directly use polyNormalPerVertex. For example, selecting a vertex and running this simple mel script;
polyNormalPerVertex -xyz 0.1 0.1 0.1;
polyNormalPerVertex -q -xyz;
will yield “0.57735 0.57735 0.57735”, which is essentially √⅓. That is, setting it to 0.1 0.1 0.1, is identical to setting it to 1.0 1.0 1.0 Obviously this wouldn’t usually be an issue, but I’d actually like to set explicit, unnormalized vector values to them. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that I would like to bake ao into the normals of a model for use in some archaic game engine. Would you guys say that this is a lost cause, or is it possible to somehow bypass maya’s vertex normalization process? This page of the documentation makes reference to it being possible to set normals of other lengths, but that page is pretty old, so I guess one solution (that i’d like to avoid) would be to temporarily use an older version.