How do I generate surface normals?

Question

I have quite a few debug drawing methods in my engine that can generate geometry useful for debugging, like spheres and cubes.

At the moment I do not generate any normals for these shapes. Is there a general purpose method of generating face normals and per vertex normals for an arbitrary mesh? (I'd imagine you would need face normals to generate per vertex normals?)

Skizz · Accepted Answer · 2010-07-30 10:43:36Z

11

To generate face normals, use the vector cross product of two edges each triangle and then normalise the result. Make sure you get the directions right, otherwise some normals will point in and some out.

Vertex normals would then be an interpolation of all the face normals the vertex is attached to.

answered Jul 30, 2010 at 10:43

Skizz

9366 silver badges10 bronze badges

\$\begingroup\$ You mean a normalized interpolation (or simply a normalized summation), presumably ;) \$\endgroup\$

Andrew Russell
– Andrew Russell

2010-07-30 11:05:46 +00:00
Commented Jul 30, 2010 at 11:05
3

\$\begingroup\$ Always renormalize after summing! Even if you interpolated from normalized vectors, the result is NOT normalized! \$\endgroup\$

Bob Somers
– Bob Somers

2010-08-01 01:13:54 +00:00
Commented Aug 1, 2010 at 1:13

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Joolsa · Accepted Answer · 2010-08-01 09:12:43Z

2

There are various ways of interpolating normals between faces. More details here: http://meshlabstuff.blogspot.com/2009/04/on-computation-of-vertex-normals.html

answered Aug 1, 2010 at 9:12

Joolsa

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