Best way to handle normals with hollow objects?

1stAnd10

So I'm creating a low poly field tent for a game and I've hit an issue where I need the inside of the tent to have outward facing normals. I've tried selecting the face and extruding them but I get unsatisfactory results with edges peeking through and overlapping faces.

How would experts or people who know what they are doing fix this? I'm going to hit this issue a lot in the models I'm creating so I figured it was best to ask the best way to do this.

Sorry if this seems easy but I'm a newbie so I'm still learning. Thanks for any help.

Eric Chadwick

This is Maya? Or 3ds Max?

For double-sided models like this, for a game engine, you'll want to manually create the backfaces. You don't want a shader to duplicate the faces automatically, because usually those new faces will inherit either default vertex normals (and thus not work well with your normal map) or else will inherit the vertex normals from the existing face (and thus be lit incorrectly).

To see the model correctly in your 3d modeler, enable backface culling. Also be sure to disable any kind of "2-sided" option. In Max this is set in the material, and in Object Properties. Can't remember how to set this in Maya.

Then you can just select the faces you want to make backfaces for, copy them without moving, and flip their vertex normals.

1stAnd10

Awesome thank you. This is Maya btw I should have mentioned that.

I read an article targeted towards Blender that mentioned that same tactic, copy the face and invert the normals.