OK, I may have answered my own question here, but I'll share what I have found. I've attached some files for you to test.
1) Normals tags are only used for internal rendering in C4D. They have no use for Keyshot, therefor can be deleted without consequence (as far as I can tell)
2) Normals tags are only applied to objects that are imported, not parametric objects created in C4D. There is no place to "Apply" a normals tag in C4D, it is automatically applied when the object is imported. The tag allows aligning and reversing normals on a purely rendering facet, and does not change the physical direction the normal is facing when interacting with dynamics and other operations that utilize a polygon's normal data. It is akin to a phong tag, but holds much more data that is invisible to the user.
3) great link here-
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php?t-922155.htmlSo, that leaves me with this conclusion- If not rendering in C4D (which I don't anymore), I am just using it for modeling, then shooting to keyshot for rendering, delete the normal tags. They offer nothing that I can see in Keyshot unless you want your model to be completely black
If I was king for a day, I would love to see keyshot just ignore the tags. Then they can stay in the C4D file, and do their job there, but just get ignored when pushed to keyshot. Maybe there is a way to get the plugin to just ignore the that particular tag. Not a programmer, so I'm not going to make any assumptions on how hard that would be
Reproduce the problem-
1) Open C4D and import the 8020 extrusion (merge)
2) Note the normals tag in the object tree
3) Hit "render" in the KS plugin, model will turn up black in KS
4) go back to C4D and delete the normals tag, hit update in the plug in
5) Model appears as it should.
