Normals problem
 

I'm trying to fix a model I made some time ago and I can't find a way to fix the normals on these faces. They're pretty even, they shouldn't be so dark, they look ugly in the render. Set to face and softening normals doesn't work, any ideas? Thank you.

Try running a mesh cleanup (under mesh)on it.................dave

I tried that and it doesn't do anything, I also merged it, deleted history etc, extracted those face and rebuilt them, nothing seems to work.

Could you show a wire only shot..............dave

Here it is, I'm also attaching a tiny zip with an obj of that section.

If you select all the verts and "unlock normal" should clear the black marks, you need to clean your mesh as you go along, there are to many ngons and parts of the that mesh that are not connected..................dave

Yea that's what I'm working on, fixing the geometry and all the ngons. I tried "Unlock Normals" but then all the faces are visible and if I do a "Soften Edge" I'm back to where I was. I kinda just gave up, I started retopologizing it 3d-coat.

You can change the soften angle to say some thing like 45-60 that should stop the distortions on the 90 degree angles..............dave

That almost fixes it but... hm I think I'll just continue with the retopoligizing now. That's really good to know though, thank you.

"Set to Face" should work if you go in it´s settings and choose "Match face normal"

And of course check your topology - if you´re not using the mesh for a game Environment I would do this with "Smooth Mesh" (Button 3) instead of softening the Normals... personal pref

try deleting the faces and bridge them again

Thanks for all the help, I'm ok with the normals for now. Just trying to figure out the topology. Is it ok to have many triangles if drawing extra lines just to have quads wouldn't actually change the geometry? Or is it considered bad geometry to have all those triangles? Thank you.