Buildings with missing surfaces

[Braddw25]

I am building a track with Bobs Track Builder and I'm having a weird problem. I can place buildings on the track and they look find in the 3d view of the track builder. However, when I export the track to Rfactor and load up the game, many of the buildings which looked fine in BTB are missing sides. They do not appear to be rendering all 4 sides of the building in rfactor. Does anyone have any idea what I might be doing wrong to cause this? The buildings I am talking about are from the Trackside objects XPAK. Thanks in advance for any help.

Bradd

 

[Emery]

They're probably single-sided materials. Either flip the normal or tag them double-sided. 3DSimEd is probably the quickest way to do that.

 

[Braddw25]

Thanks for the help Emery. Here is the problem though. The buildings look fine in 3dsimEd, but when I get into Rfactor, suddenly the surfaces are missing. How can I tell which normals to flip if they all are showing up in 3dsimed? The first pic shows the buildings in 3dsimed, the second shows them in Rfactor with the missing sides. Thanks again for your help.

 

[Braddw25]

I think I have this problem solved. I used 3dsimed to make all the materials double sided, and now the buildings are rendering correctly. Thank you very much for your help, Emery.

 

[R Soul]

Making the materials double sided may make the objects look right,and you can probably get away with it for such low-poly objects, but it's not the proper solution. The game will have to make extra calculations to draw them.

In other words, only use that solution as a quick-fix for low poly objects. For anything with high-detail (or occuring in a large number) the best solution is for the objects to be built properly with the faces at the correct orientation.

 

[Braddw25]

Thank you for the advice, R Soul. I don't currently know how to do what you are describing, but I will certainly look into it. I have experience with flipping normals to make sure the faces are oriented correctly, but I do not know how to do that in 3dsimed yet. Thanks again for the help.