Coloring front and back oriented faces in Blender 4.4

Since Blender 4.4, the color scheme for displaying polygon orientation in the 3D viewport has changed. When in previous versions polygons that had the front orientation (normals are directed “outward” of the mesh) were displayed in blue, then in version 4.4 these polygons are not highlighted at all.

.blend file on Patreon

On the one hand, such a color scheme seems more convenient to use, since usually we only need to find and correct polygons with the wrong orientation (which look “inward” of the mesh), and they, as before, are highlighted in red.

On the other hand, we can easily return the usual highlighting of polygons.

To do this, we need to:

1. Open the “Preferences” area
2. Switch to the “Themes” tab
3. In the list, expand the “3D Viewport” section
4. Find the “Face Orientation Front” parameter in it
5. Click on the color field and in the popup window with the color wheel, set the Alpha parameter to 0.7

Now, polygons oriented in front will be highlighted in blue, as in previous versions of Blender.

We can also adjust these color settings using the Blender Python API.

We can get a pointer to the current Blender color theme as follows:

The object responsible for the color scheme of the 3D viewport is called “view_3d”, and its property responsible for highlighting frontally oriented polygons is “face_front”.

To change the highlight, set a new color value for this property, in which the transparency (Alpha) is set to 0.7.

This way, we can set the usual highlight of correctly oriented polygons, as in previous versions of Blender.