Michael Licavoli presents a simple technique for fixing normal orientation on a model that has already been bound to a rig and animated in Maya.
…In this video I will show you a simple technique that repairs flipped normals on an object that has already been skinned and animated within Maya…
You attempt to catch everything in an animation pipeline, however, there may be times when one tiny think has snuck by mostly everyone on the team, such as the normals being off in a character model that has already been animated in a scene.
Michael notes that there are a few ways to fix the normals in this situation, however he proposes a super simple method by exporting the selected model as an OBJ file and reimporting that OBJ into Maya, and re-skinning the new model and transferring the weights from the original to the new model.
