Philippe Hurbain Wrote:One problem, how to make sure the normals comment remains attached to its triangle/quad? Maybe this could be solved by dumping and regenerating normals after each edit...
You mean during the part design? well either the author is aware of normals and work with them, or they could be wiped and recalculated each time for the whole part.
Philippe Hurbain Wrote:But I don't clearly see how you make it work with joined primitives. An example: http://www.ldraw.org/library/official/p/bump5000.dat, made of 3 cone primitives and currently smoothed by condlines.[/quote]
Here's an example of the case i speculated above. The problem is not smoothing, as the part as a whole will be smoothed correctly, the problem is that the same cone primitives are used for both cones and spherical surfaces, and will need a different set of normals in different cases. Sadly this breaks the assumption i made. The only solution here is to change the primitives to keep normals in mind, ie clarifiing when a surface is intended to be flat or is an approximation of a smooth surface.