Auto NURBS normals conform?

[Steve Davy]

Is there any quick way to get the surface normals on a bunch of NURBS surfaces to all face in the same direction?

I've been working a lot with IGES files coming out of CAD programs, and when I bring the files into Maya a lot of the normals are facing the wrong way. With polys this is a simple "Conform" command, with NURBS so far as I'm aware the only way to flip the normals is to rebuild the surfaces, and that means doing it on a per-surface basis, depending on which surfaces need to have them flipped.

Is there a quick fix for this?

I suspect there may be an option to address this issue when exporting from the CAD program, but that means going back to my client which is more trouble than it's worth.

[stephenkmann]

Instead of rebuilding 

Show origins 

Reverse surface direction.  

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[Steve Davy]

Actually, I did mean Reverse Surface Direction not rebuild.

Can you elaborate a bit Steve? I'm not sure how showing origins helps? The main problem here is just that I have a huge number of surfaces and the only easy way to see which way each one is facing is to turn on normals and examine the overall model to see if it's facing out or in, and correcting accordingly. Ideally I just need a way to make them ALL point in the same direction, a la polys. But I'm guessing this simply isn't possible as there is no way for Maya to "know" which is out and which is in since they are separate surfaces, unlike with multiple poly faces of a single mesh.

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Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2012 19:01:28 -0400
Subject: Re: [maya_he3d] Auto NURBS normals conform?
From: stephe...@gmail.com
To: maya...@googlegroups.com

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[stephenkmann]

Showing origins will show you wich way the normal is facing.  ( as well as u and v ). This will make it much easier to spot how they showed be layed out to make them all face the same way.   The u an v will line up as well as the normal.