On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 5:49 AM, Armin Hornung <
HornungA@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> I have a few meshes which I converted from VRML to STL to be rendered as
> robot body parts (specified in the robot's URDF). Is it possible to make
> the RViz rendering more "smooth"? A different Ogre-based rendering tool
> displays the curvatures very smooth, while RViz seems to display each
> triangle as a flat surface (no interpolation of the surface normals). If
> I look at the meshes in Meshlab, the RViz view corresponds to "flat",
> while what I want to achieve corresponds to "smooth". Maybe there is a
> setting that I need to activate in the Mesh file or the URDF?
>

rviz will use whatever normals are specified in the STL file, unless they're
magnitude 0 (and thus invalid... a lot of tools don't write normals into STL
files), in which case it calculates the face normal.