How to tell if NORMAL faces down or away?

itgiawa

Ive gota third-person camera with 8 fixed angles and my terrain is blocky like minecraft and sometimes I cut off the skyward face of my cubes so you can see inside

My goal is to identify if I'm drawing on a backface (inside of a cube) and if so then cover it up with a solid color or maybe a special design.

But I don't know what the NORMALs look like, I assume they are all normalized.

I tried this code to try and figure out what different normals literally look like

    if (NORMAL == vec3(0, -1, 0)) {
    		ALBEDO = vec3(.5, .5, .5)
    	}
    	if (NORMAL == vec3(0, 1, 0)) {
    		ALBEDO = vec3(.1, .1, .5)
    	}
    	if (NORMAL == vec3(1, 0, 0)) {
    		ALBEDO = vec3(.1, .9, .9)
    	}
    	if (NORMAL == vec3(-1, 0, 0)) {
    		ALBEDO = vec3(.2, .2, 0)
    	}
    	if (NORMAL == vec3(0, 0, 1)) {
    		ALBEDO = vec3(.7, .3, .3)
    	}
    	if (NORMAL == vec3(0, 0, -1)) {
    		ALBEDO = vec3(.2, .7, .7)
    	}

None of the inside faces were colored, however outer right facing sides were colored light blue , but no other faces changed color

Any idea how to get the downward or backward facing parts of the cubes?

TwistedTwigleg

My hunch is that the reason it's not working is because there is some floating point precision issues, so it doesn't directly point on a single axis. Instead of checking to see if it's exactly equal to a direction, you probably will need to check if it's close to the direction.

There are probably better ways to do this, but I think this should work around the floating point precision issues (assuming it's causing the issue):

if (length(NORMAL - vec3(0, -1, 0) < 0.1)
{
	ALBEDO = vec3(.5, .5, .5);
}
else if (length(NORMAL - vec3(0, 1, 0) < 0.1)
{
	ALBEDO = vec3(.1, .1, .5)
}
else if (length(NORMAL - vec3(1, 0, 0) < 0.1)
{
	ALBEDO = vec3(.1, .9, .9)
}
else if (length(NORMAL - vec3(-1, 0, 0) < 0.1)
{
	ALBEDO = vec3(.2, .2, 0)
}
else if (length(NORMAL - vec3(0, 0, 1) < 0.1)
{
	ALBEDO = vec3(.7, .3, .3)
}
else if (length(NORMAL - vec3(0, 0, -1) < 0.1)
{
	ALBEDO = vec3(.2, .7, .7)
}