#Invisible windows…
I've been playing with a drawing of the building that I work in. It is a 3D
Autocad R11 drawing, mainly of the floor that I work on. (I'm going to use
it for a walkthrough tour of our labs) I've tried to isolate each different
material on its own layer, so that our tan cinder block walls are on a
different layer from our tan metal prefab walls, for instance. That makes
it easier to apply colors and textures to the objects when I move them to
3DSR2 (I've been importing the DXF file by layer).
One strange thing: Some of our labs have doors with windows in them, so
I've defined a "DOOR" layer, a "GLASS" layer and a "KNOB" layer. I made the
door by extruding a closed rectangular polyline and the hole for the window
by extruding another one inside the first. I put 3D surfaces on the door in
4 panels on each side, being careful to define the patch vertices clockwise
so the normals point out. I then put a single glass panel into the door
(halfway in so the pane is in the center of the thickness of the door) and
the knobs and kick plates on the outside.
No matter what I do, the doors come out solid! The window is there because
it shows up if I hide the door. I've even tried removing the boundary
polylines and replacing them with 3D faces, but no luck so far. I can't use
AME to cut a hole by subtraction because my AME 2 magic number hasn't
arrived yet.
Ideas? Chris