Hi ,
I have a houdini hda that generating some poly data , but the normal of the poly is weird , i tried to add a normal sop as point or vertex in houdini with different face angle inside my hda , but still can't get a good normal ?
I tried also to change the setting for the hda in maya interface (“preserver mesh locked normals”) , but it didn't help .

I attached an image to the result i get in maya to show the problem , if i load my hda in cinema 4d , it's give me a good poly normal by default !

Is there any solution to get a sharp or good normal ?

any help is appreciated .

Hi Nour,

Could you please attach the HDA in question?

Sorry , can't attach the hda for now , i will try to make a simple hda from it .

The easiest way to do this is to lock all the normals coming out of Houdini in Maya.
In your hda, add an integer vertex attribute called maya_locked_vertex*, and set all the values to 1.
OOPs - that should be “maya_locked_normal” not “maya_locked_vertex*

Then on the asset node itself, turn on preserveMeshLockedNormal, and turn off preserveMeshHardEdges.

This does have the overhead of needing memory for all the locked vertex-face normals on the Maya side.

Alternatively, if the normals should just be the face normals across the hard edges, you don't need to lock the normals, you can figure out which edges should be hard in you hda, and put them in an edge group called ”maya_hard_edge“. and then use the ConvertMayaHardEdgeToAttribute tool from the HoudiniEngine shelf (on the Games Desktop), to create and set the ”maya_hard_edge" vertex attribute, and turn ON preserveMeshHardEdges on the assetNode. But it's up to the hda to decide which are edges are hard, so that's more work for you.

I tried , but it didn't help .

and in maya hda setting

Oops that was a typo on my part, should be maya_locked_normal. (will edit my post again to hilight the typo)

Yes , it's working , many thanks .