I know that I making some kind of hypern00b mistake, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out what it is! I also know that I’ve done it before, but can’t find it in my previous posts.
https://playground.babylonjs.com/#ZJYNY#622
When I put this model into transparent and/or point cloud, I see tons of details; otherwise, I can’t get the details to show up. Any pointers?
By details, I mean curves. So e.g., I threw a light on it from the side, still nothing.
Hi saitogroup,
I think the problem is with your model’s normals; this is a very bizarre mesh. If you look at the mesh in the Inspector under the “Debug” category and enable “Display Normals,” the entire mesh renders as a solid color, indicating every single vertex in this mesh thinks it has the same normal. To validate whether this was the issue, I used createNormals() to generate new normals from the vertex positions. Does the following look more like what you were expecting to see?
that looks exactly what it’s supposed to look like!
well, I made the mesh using this, SculptGL - A WebGL sculpting app, which is kind of a wild program
so… what are normals? is that in the documentation somewhere?
Glad it looks as you expect!
Normals are a core concept of 3D rendering. Babylon does have some documentation on them, but a more comprehensive treatment is really beyond the scope of engine docs and belongs in a larger overview of shading. As a side note, that mesh also has a lot of triangles and is consequently pretty heavy, so I’d definitely say your characterization of SculptGL as “kind of a wild program” sounds pretty accurate. 
Cool, though!
OK, imma read about that! In the meantime… check it out: https://www.instagram.com/p/COlr-Kkl1iX/?igshid=19aj1d2z2ngtx