Remove Normals on the Points tab deletes the normals of the selected point clouds; the points stay as they are. You may need it when:
- The normals in a file are wrong. If a cloud comes from other software with badly oriented normals, Points to Mesh and Fusion use them and build a poor mesh. Without normals, both tools compute their own.
- You want a smaller file. When a cloud has normals, MeshInspector writes them to PLY and ASC files on export. Without normals, these files are smaller.
You do not need to remove normals before computing new ones: Make Normals replaces them. Turn off Orient as Existing Normals in its panel if the old normals face the wrong way.
How to remove normals
- Select one or more point clouds in the Scene tree.
- Click Points › Remove Normals.
The tool works at once and has no panel. To get the normals back, use Undo (Ctrl+Z, or Cmd+Z on macOS) or compute new ones with Make Normals. If none of the selected clouds has normals, the button is unavailable and its tooltip says All point clouds already don't have normals.
What changes
In this example, the normals of a terrain scan are shown as white lines with Inspect › Show Normals:
You can click Remove Normals while Show Normals is still on.
After it, the normal lines are gone and the cloud is shown in its own colors, without shading. The Information panel shows Point Normals: No, and Orient Point Normals, Flip Normals and Remove Normals become unavailable, because they need normals:
