Did you abandon this project? Tool would come in very handy for me… :(
Actually, James, this project evolved into a feature within my other program, The Forge. Of course, it has been a long time since I updated that either. I haven't officially abandoned this project, but I have a lot of other parts of this site that I think have a higher priority right now (the C# crash course and updating all of the tutorials to XNA 4.0, for two examples). There's just not enough time in the day to do everything I want to do with this site. But I do appreciate your comments. It lets me know that there are still people interested in this. If there's enough people interested in it, I'll keep it going. (I'm just getting far more emails for the other stuff, right now.)
I use Wings3D and this would be a great tool to use if it saves it into the OBJ file. I can edit the smoothing and hardness in Wings3D BUT It does not export the changes I made. For example I set the Autosmoothing to 30. it looks great in wings3D but when exporting the OBJ the normals are still the default. I need a tool like this that will allow me to edit the normals so when I import the object into Daz Studio, Poser, Blender or any other program that it turnes out correctly.
I use the edge hardness in Wings3D all the time, and it works perfectly. To clarify, you can select any edge, right click, and choose Hardness > Hard, and the edge will look sharp (both in Wings3D, as well as in other programs after you export). I know this is the case for FBX and OBJ files, because I've done it with both. Some programs ignore normals when loading a program. For instance, I know Bryce 5.5 doesn't do anything with it. It's actually quite frustrating. Daz Studio is also made by the same company, and it wouldn't surprise me if it has the same limitation. I can't say anything for sure about Poser, I only used it a little bit, 12 years ago, and I'm sure it has changed in that time. With Blender, I'd be surprised if it failed to load models with sharp edges.
Of course, if a program fails to load a model's normals correctly, then even having this 3D Model Normal Editor won't fix the problem either.
So to sum it up, if you use the edge hardness tools in Wings3D, it should take care of those problems for the most part. In fact, it was either the development of that feature in Wings, or my discovery of that feature that made it so I was a whole lot less motivated to keep working on this project. That's not so say that I don't have plans to do any more work on this (I'd love to come back to it some day) but with that feature in Wings, it meant there wasn't nearly as big of a need. Wings should be able to take care of the needs of 99.5% of the people who have a need for this program anyway, with the edge hardness feature.
Yeah… this project definitely fits under the "Archived" category now. I haven't done anything with it in almost 10 years. Things like Blender and Wings 3D are good choices now, and can do this kind of thing just fine. I'd suggest you pick one of those or find another similar tool.
Have you tried Blender 3D? it;s free open source and can do any task that max,maya and xsi can… try it, normal flipping is trivial, for instance:
load your model (many formats accepted for import and export) select your object (named mesh) enter edit mode by pressing TAB, select all vertices (by pressing A) then press CTRL N to recalculate normals and that's it. save it and enjoy
Ohhh I looked at your normal editor page and I found that what you want, is really select which poligon is smooth or flat shaded, Blender can do that easily too.
load your model, enter edit mode (TAB) select the FACES you want to be either smooth or flat shaded, and press T to bring the tools panel out, the click the flat or smooth buttons in the Shading panel and presto!!!
hope this helps anyone…