should i model thickness of material?

Yonderboy

Hi, 

i was wondering if there is a general rule/s for when to model the thickness of a material?. 

Im modelling a tent to sell online. Its intended use could be any platform really. mobile, PC etc. and I was wondering if I should model the thickness of the canvas (inside) or just use a single sided plane have a double sided shader?

Ill be creating 2 different materials, one with baked in lighting and one which would be PBR. If I model using only a single plane the inside of the tent would appear light (as the outside). 

I've attached an image of how it looks currently...

I appreciate this is a bit of a basic question, but would appreciate any advice

many thanks

Nick

EliasWick

Hey Nick.

There are sites where you can find a spreadsheet on material thickness. It is nothing that I personally would use, unless I am creating something that has to be in a specific size. A simple google search would be enough to get the required measurements.

In your case, if the material isn't going to be transparent, you generally don't have to worry about material thickness. just make it look good with as little polygons as you can. (Optimized models are appreciated).

gsokol

For something like this, where its expected that a player could or would get inside, I would model the inside. 

igi

You could get interior appearance with two sided material setup in unreal and unity engines. But if you're looking for two sided material appearance by default then you may want to model the interior faces.

For very thin double sided surfaces I generally apply to this: 

  You don't need to model actual thickness for your low poly. You can bake normals of your hi-poly model with thickness into one sided low-poly model. Then you can select your low-poly geometry then duplicate it then invert the duplicated parts and then push it inwards for a few milimeters just for preventing flickering z-fighting in the engine. 



 

ambelamba

Actually I had a same kind of question, especially for the costumes of the characters.

Eric Chadwick

There's no zfighting when the surfaces are single-sided. No need to push them. In my experience.

Clothes are mostly outside only. Except at the edges where the player can see, then you only duplicate and flip what's absolutely needed.