If you want, i can try to explain briefly what normals are and how they work.
i don't know well how part authoring work, but for a normal 3d application, such as blender, you can define your mesh first, and then you can edit normals in many ways. The easiest is let the program compute them, for example by using a smooth shading command on the whole object. You can specify an arbitrary angle for "hard" edges, and you end up with something like this
![[Image: Edge_Split_to_improve_Smooth_Shading.png]](http://wiki.blender.org/uploads/e/e8/Edge_Split_to_improve_Smooth_Shading.png)
This is a one click solution that works for most cases.
Or you can manually select a number of faces that you want to smooth and fine control it. Or by specifying edges to be smoother around.
So, there's no math to do, they're usually calculated by the 3d program and eventually tuned.
For part authoring, i think it can be completely automated, like it is right now after all. Only, instead of calculating it when you display the file in LDView, you calculate it right after you author the part, and put the data in it.
i don't know well how part authoring work, but for a normal 3d application, such as blender, you can define your mesh first, and then you can edit normals in many ways. The easiest is let the program compute them, for example by using a smooth shading command on the whole object. You can specify an arbitrary angle for "hard" edges, and you end up with something like this
This is a one click solution that works for most cases.
Or you can manually select a number of faces that you want to smooth and fine control it. Or by specifying edges to be smoother around.
So, there's no math to do, they're usually calculated by the 3d program and eventually tuned.
For part authoring, i think it can be completely automated, like it is right now after all. Only, instead of calculating it when you display the file in LDView, you calculate it right after you author the part, and put the data in it.