Blender indoors area modelling backface issue

General Discussion
1

Hi

I’m creating levels of retro-style first-person rpg in Blender. I’ve built outdoors area (houses, castle, mountains, river) with relative ease (with a lot of googling, of course). But now I’m stuck with indoors area (some sort of dungeon).

I’m a novice in 3D modeling, so maybe I’m wrong in very basic things. Please feel free to correct me.

  1. It’s obvious that dungeon is large 3D model with normals pointed to the inside. So I just flipped normals of starting cube before starting transform it to the level by extrude-scale-move.
  2. Most of time I’d like to watch on the level from outside, so to be able to see it well I checked “Backface Culling” for the material of cube (I use large tileset, so there is only one material for the almost whole area).
  3. All looks good, but… I cannot select inner faces, because blender think I want to select outer (culled) faces. It feels tricky to create are without possibility to select inner faces from outside the level bounds…
    image
    image525×514 44.3 KB

What am I doing wrong?

Please share your experience, how to make such things better?

PS: Blender 2.8
PS2: Issue is only in Blender. I haven’t even tried it in JME (but pretty sure it will be ok, because JME renders only front faces by default)

2

Turn off face culling.

Ideally though, you’d only want to do this in spectator mode.

material.getAdditionalRenderstate.setCullMode(Off);

3

thanks for a link. this article helps to hide backfaces - that’s great. But unfortunately, it doesn’t help to ignore these culled backfaces when you select faces in edit mode.

4

Just found a way. It’s better than nothing, but still very tricky to use.

In Wireframe Mode blender selects face by the proximity of mouse pointer to the center of face (shown as dot) instead of nearest to the camera.
image

I do not believe that there is no more convenient way. Any ideas or hints are still welcome!

5

Select the faces that you want to work through and press ‘h’ to hide them. When you want them back again, press alt-h.

You could also mess with layers and stuff but I think probably ‘h’ is the easiest.

2 Likes
6

Thanks for the hint! How often do you use it? Is it common or just for rare very complex cases?

7

I hide things all the time to get them out of the way. For any complex scene, you frequently work on only parts of it at a time and may hide the rest.

Even in the phone booth I built in the time lapse in this video:

…I hide things and that’s a pretty simple model.

In this one, the bulk of the scene was a complex particle system so I was hiding things all the time just for sanity, but that was at the scene level:

…so it just depends, but controlling visibility while editing is essential and there are plenty of tools in blender to make it easier/harder depending on your workflow. Whether it’s collections or layers or whatever.

3 Likes
8

Wow. Thank you) Very interesting. Very enlighting videos. Especially with ancient town.

9

I was just goofing around with using a particle system to render a town. Took forever to render that short flyover clip at the end of the video. :slight_smile:

Edit: and note, I’m still mostly a Blender-noob. I use these little projects as an excuse to push my learning… spent 60% of the time in the shader nodes editor with this build. :slight_smile:

2 Likes