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I've been learning Blender and I've been following some tutorials. I went pretty far with one of them only to realize that my normals seem to be messed up because of the lightning and also my inability to use tools such as Shrink/Flatten.

So I went ahead and made Blender display the normals of my mesh and they look like this:

normals as small dots.

I circled the small blue dots that are supposed to be my normals.

You may think that they are flipped or that I need to recalculate them, I've already tried that and nothing changes. The only thing I see is that little blue dot on some faces. I've also tried increasing the normals's size to maximum (10) but I still can't see anything other than the dot.

Any idea?

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    $\begingroup$ What happens if you apply the scale of the object (Ctrl A in object mode?) $\endgroup$
    – gandalf3
    Commented Oct 30, 2015 at 5:51
  • $\begingroup$ Wow, it works. What the hell? What's the explanation behind this? $\endgroup$
    – Renato
    Commented Oct 30, 2015 at 6:02
  • $\begingroup$ I just read the docs, it makes sense. Apparently my scale was at 0.00000002 something, when I apply it resets back to 1, making normals visible. Thanks a lot Gandalf! $\endgroup$
    – Renato
    Commented Oct 30, 2015 at 6:13

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Sounds like your object may have some unapplied object scale.
Press ⎈ CtrlA> Scale in object mode to apply it.

The length of the normal indicators is defined in object space; scaling the mesh down in edit mode makes the indicators "longer" relative to the mesh:

enter image description here

But scaling in object mode scales object space itself, keeping the indicator size proportional to the mesh size. So if you have a huge object scaled down a lot, you'll end up with very small indicators.

Object scale behaves like a sort of offset, only affecting the apparent size of the object while mesh operators such and "see" the object without any object scaling. This can affect other things besides normal indicators, so it's a good idea to be aware of this behavior.

See Why are the longer edges being beveled more?

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