gmax doublesided polygon trick...

[Guest christian]

I tried to create double sided polygons yesterday in gmax. I remembered that the material name _DS would do the job for me, but I got stuck already in gmax. I found the switch 'doublesided' in the material box, but I didn't find a way to assign different materials to the two sides. Obviously, I really wanted to see how things looked like in gmax before doing the export.I came across this 'trick'. Rather than naming you polygon _DS and making it doublesided, clone-copy and flip it. This creates a new polygon that you can see in gmax and manipulate to your liking (ie drop a texture on it and uvw unwrap it). The mdl exporter won't do anything else, it will do exactly the same.This trick works better in my opinion than the _DS naming, especially when you want to drop different materials onto both sides (as I had to).Cheers, Christian

[Guest]

This method also allows to avoid annoying brightness of sun reflection on "inner" face of element_DS. It doesn't look good or natural, if usually shaded part is bright. Ted