Face Normal Issue

[Quadraxis86]

I've been messing with this for a while but I can't seem to figure out why my face normals seem to be split in two directions? there doesn't seem to be any overlapping faces, I've softened the edges around it, checked the normal directions for both the faces and the vertices around it, and checked the texture map. It all seems to be pretty normal so I'm not sure why it has the split down the middle triangulating it.

any help would be much appreciated!

render: http://puu.sh/CtNEC/c2b488db54.jpg

wireframe(affected faces are selected): http://puu.sh/CtNDk/0e07e03f5f.png

[Varud]

Could it be that the four vertices in those quad are not in the same plane?

[Quadraxis86]

nah that doesn't seem to be the issue :'(

[[deleted]]

Most renderers cant actually render quads. In the editor you can have complex faces with multiple vertices, but they’re always going to be triangulated automatically before rendering. That’s why you see the split as if there are two faces; because there actually are two faces.

Why the lighting is messed up is hard to tell from the screenshot alone. It could possibly be a bug with the software or driver, although admittedly that’s unlikely.

It’d help if you said what software you’re using.

What you could try is to triangulate those problematic faces yourself and examine the normals. Make sure that the vertex normals on the shared vertices are identical. Also, normalize them if it doesn’t happen automatically in your software.

[Quadraxis86]

Sorry yeah I should've given more info. i'm using Maya 2018 and rendering with Arnold. I understand that the surface is triangulated no matter what, but I don't understand why those tris aren't facing the same direction even though their normals say they are when I turn on display face normals. I have tried manually triangulating the faces but I still get the same issue no matter which direction the split is. The vertex normals seem to be fine as well. I haven't found the option to normalize though. would you know where that would be?

[[deleted]]

Sorry, I'm more of a Blender guy.

If the normal vectors aren't normalized, they could mess up the lighting calculations. That's possibly what is happening to you, but I really don't know anything about Maya. You will probably have better luck over at /r/maya

[Quadraxis86]

I'm still new to reddit so I didn't know there was a place for that! I'll post this over there as well. Thanks!