My walls are disappearing

[bnewton81]

Why are some of my walls going invisible on me when i run around them in uru? They'll be fine at first then I'll get to a certain angle and they go clear.

[Jojon]

Faces are one-sided by default. If your age has zero-thickness surfaces, that are viewable from both sides, you can flag them as two-sided, by marking the appropriate button under the "Texture Face" tab (..along with "Shared", to make the sides "share" the one texture).

Note that doing this will affect the ONE face that is your active one. Press the nearby "Copy" button, to copy its modes to every face in secondary selection.

[tachzusamm]

Now, you shouldn't get the impression it's best to just make everything two-sided.
Two-sided faces are good for leaves on a tree, or grass - but walls normally have a thickness, or, better said, an inner and an outer side (inside the room, and outside of it).
What comes into play here is that faces have normals. You can make them visible in Blender in edit mode under Editing (F9) => Mesh Tools More => Draw Normals.
The cyan colored lines indicate from which direction a face is visible if one-sided.
So I would make a wall of two planes (basically), and with a gap representing the thickness between them; the inner side's normals pointing inside the room, the other side's normals pointing to the outside.
This way you can texture both sides of the real wall differently.
If the normals point to the wrong direction, you can flip them under Editing(F9) => Mesh Tools => Flip Normals.

[bnewton81]

good tips. But I am not having a normals problem. Its as if the camera is going through the wall, but it isn't I don't think.

[tachzusamm]

Oh, that.

Well, if you use custom cameras, be sure to set the maintainLOS flag (http://www.guildofwriters.com/wiki/CameraControls). But I guess you did not use them yet.
The normal camera tries to stay away from colliders, as the avatar does. If it still goes through walls, it can have these reasons:
a) Your walls don't have colliders. Either set the mesh to Triangle Mesh under Logic (F4) => Bounds or, better, surround them with invisible colliders, made of very simple meshes.
b) The area where you walk through is a bit small (e.g. the ceiling is too low or a tunnel is to narrow in width). In this case, it sometimes happens the camera still goes through walls because it's difficult to keep it properly inside a small tunnel, especially when it turns direction with radius too low.
So better try to avoid small tunnels, think D'ni, make your walkable areas large, like D'ni caverns.

[J'Kla]

I had some issues with this and came up with a work around where I had no internal edges. It has worked for me but may not be a solution for everyone.

My latest age Cidoirep is virtually all walls none of which are double sided but for that age position is everything.

If you load this age stand alone and use flymode to go above the age you will see what I mean.

[Jojon]

If you are determined to have a follow camera trailing you through a tight space, with as little near distance clipping as possible, you can also switch to a different camera, with custom POSition (relative to avatar) and PointOnAvatar (view target), chosen to clear the boundries reasonably well.

It's all to easy to make the avatar obstruct the entire view, this way, though. :9


EDIT: Have any of our Max-using writers tried rail cams yet, btw?

[bnewton81]

Yeah, i bet my angle is too steep or my ceiling too low. J'Kla seems to be on to something, but i didn't understand him. Did he mean he had no ceilings? and how can you have no internal edges? Unless you are rolling around in one of those hamster balls.

What would happen if you put your linkinpoint inside a rigid body like a sphere? Hmm. Just wondering.