So I’m trying to make an empty room in blender because I couldn’t find anything online and I just used a mesh box, but when I render it in panda, as soon as I go inside the box I can’t see it. Any idea how I would make, or find a box that is almost like a room from the inside. I know this is probably a stupid question but I’m brand new to this.
This is a fairly general issue. There are a few different options.
- Use the Solidify Modifier on the mesh faces to thicken the geometry
- Use separate geometry to model the inside wall in-faces and the outside wall out-faces
Most likely, the reason you cannot see the inside of the box is because the mesh is only one-sided, and the sides face out, not in.
To expand on that a bit, in order to improve performance (I believe that it is), Panda–and most engines, I daresay–renders only polygons that are “facing” the camera.
Polygons that “face away from” the camera are assumed to be on the far-/back- side of whatever object theyr’e a part of, and thus not visible. As a result, rendering them would be a waste of resources.
This does, however, mean that if you go “inside” an object that has outward-facing polygons, those polygons will all disappear.
You should be able to see this effect in Blender, too, by activating “backface culling”. (Where that option is located may depend on your version of Blender.)
And if you want to see which way a polygon is facing without having it become invisible from behind, have Blender display surface-normals: these should point in the direction in which their associated polygon or vertex is facing.
As to what to do about it, I second Simulan’s suggestions, above!
One more option is to instruct Panda to render polygons as “two-sided”–but this can have unintended effects on lighting.
Brilliant, just sorted it, thanks so much for the help!
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