hello,

whenever I cut on my display smooth shaded or smooth wire shaded all of my polygonal geometry in the viewport goes black. All primitives are visible though.

is there some setting that I may have accidentally changed?

thanks,

Adam

hi again,

I think this had to do with the merge sop. I think it did something strange with the normal attributes of the polygonal geometry. If this is the issue I think I might be on the right path to correcting things. We shall see.

solved!

THe merge sop was doing something odd with the attributes created by the facet sop higher in the tree. I just disabled the facet and everything came back.

Sorry to bother with the post.

Adam

When you merge elements together if some have normals added and some don't the bits that don't will have normals created and set to (0,0,0) hence the black. You should see a warning message on the merge sop saying there was a mismatch of attributes.

Personally I think it would be a nice feature for the merge sop to detect that case and add “correct” normals, however it doesn't and that's why you see black geometry.
You can either remove them higher up the chain, as you have found out, or remove them after the merge or add a new facet sop and recalculate all the normals, all 3 ways will remove the black.

Thanks Simon! That is indeed a strange way for the merge sop to behave but at least its a very easy fix once you aware of what is happening.

Thanks again for the tips!

Adam