Copy-Pasting a layer also copies normals?

G-E · Defense Minister **Joined**: 09 Feb 2015

This didn't use to be the case, say I have a symmetrical object already drawn, and I update the look of one side, then want to copy it over the other side...

I'm not adding new pixels, just replacing the colour values of the ones already there, and in previous versions the normals were left alone.... NOW it screws them up on the destination.

If this is intended behaviour, can we make it optional please...

Atomic_Noodles · Defense Minister **Joined**: 05 Oct 2011

Can't you just redo the normals though?

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G-E · Defense Minister **Joined**: 09 Feb 2015

Holy crap, I get flak no matter what I suggest, either I'm being lazy, or overly picky...

If I say I want better auto-normals I'm told real men do normals with a crib sheet manually.

If I say I want to preserve normals, I'm told to just use the auto function.

There's a time and place for every "feature" and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's spent a lot of time "touching up" normals on an otherwise nearly perfect auto job...

I don't want to worry about screwing that up, because it would often be just as much work fixing the normals as drawing the colour again. If I'm ADDING new pixels then I don't care, because I'm probably still doing extensive updates to the voxel.

Perhaps the best option I see is, copy the normals if they become new pixels, and retain the old normals if they are pasted over existing pixels... that would be perfect.

This would allow someone to clear the layer first if they wanted to copy the normals, and no settings would be required.

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Orac · Posted: Tue Mar 17, 2015 1:38 am Post subject:

When the mirror function is used, normals should be inverted across the axis. It's really dumb that the mirror function doesn't already do this, because nobody ever, ever wants their voxel to have the inverse normal on one side. And it'd make hand normals a lot less labour intensive to paint.

There are so many edge cases outside of that that I don't see it being feasible to implement anything more complex.

Atomic_Noodles · Defense Minister **Joined**: 05 Oct 2011

Well that's just how i dealt with it. Another method I did was placing it in the spot on the canvas I wanted it to be on. Normalize it there then copy that into the planned voxel. Yeah it takes alot of time but perfection takes time anyway.

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G-E · Defense Minister **Joined**: 09 Feb 2015

So can we agree to preserve normals on existing dots, and copy the normals on new dots?

I can't say I've mirrored anything yet, because when making an all new model, I generally draw boxes on each axis at several points to start. Then if I'm happy with the overall shape/aspect, I start to carve expected profiles on some layers, filling it in chunks.

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