User:Rohanrathi/GSoC 2017/Final Report

=Final Report=

With over 12 weeks of continuous coding, Blender now has a working normal editor. This page showcases the final report of my work done during GSoC '17. In my 12 weeks of coding, I have established a base for loop normal invalidation, rebuilding custom loop normals using lazy initialization and have written a large set of tools to manipulate custom normals after taking input from the community.

What all was done
I implemented the functionality proposed in my proposal with varying degrees of modification. The links below provide documentation for all the features added. My weekly reports add to the timing and chronology of work done. The following differ from original planning:


 * 1) Implemented Align as an option for point normals, which itself houses a wide array of tools.
 * 2) Weighted Normals has been implemented as a modifier.
 * 3) Copy/Paste and few other tools are housed under what I call 'Normal Interface Tools' which interact with an XYZ input in the UI.
 * 4) Preset to harden and soften has been reworked to not smoothen on the basis of face normal average, but as an average of adjacent vertex normals and is named as Smoothen in the UI.

To Do
There are some things left to do, for example adding proper support for 3 level weights in Weighted Normal modifier. I had put split tool in my Todo, but cleared it beforehand.
 * 1) Adding Support for 3 level weights in the modifier. (DONE)
 * 2) Fixing custom normal data broken when triangulation or the modifier is applied. This is much trickier to do. I've an idea to possibly to fix up all lnor space data to be remapped when loop indices change but I'm not sure if it is even possible. Even if it is, it will require a lot of work. Though this can potentially fix all problems with keeping custom normals, its just speculation for now. If not I can certainly work out a hackish way to preserve data for triangulation.

Links
GSoC branch containing all my work done: https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/browse/soc-2017-normal-tools/

Proposal: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:RohanRathi/GSoC_2017/Proposal

Weekly Reports: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:RohanRathi/GSoC_2017/Reports

My Blender Artists thread: https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?427746-GSoC-2017-Normal-Editing-Tools

User Documentation: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:RohanRathi/GSoC_2017/User_Documentation