Two-sided material in matlab

Alec Jacobson

March 23, 2015

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Unfortunately there seems to be no builtin support for two-sided surfaces in matlab. There's some rudimentary control over back-face lighting, but that's all. At least you can determine the back-facing triangles for a given camera position:

N = normals(V,F);
BC = barycenter(V,F);
back_facing = sum(N.*bsxfun(@minus,BC,campos),2)<=0;

Here's an example for an armadillo mesh:

t = tsurf(F,V,'EdgeColor','none','FaceLighting','phong');view(2);
axis equal;
camproj('persp')
t.FaceVertexCData = 1*(sum(N.*bsxfun(@minus,BC,campos),2)<=0)
apply_ambient_occlusion();

Of course, if you change the view, the coloring is no longer valid:

So you need to recompute the coloring:

You can also insert nans to achieve back-face culling:

t.FaceVertexCData(sum(N.*bsxfun(@minus,BC,campos),2)>0) = nan;