Celestia Forums

Ok, being new but getting better at this, I have examined a model, that it works in animator, views perfectly, but when I compile it down to CMOd for celestia, something goes wrong, it looses some panels and looks weird, like it's a 2d model, the original file is www.3dvia.com/content/BE292B48698AABC it was made by micheal Peterson. Can someone look it over?

Unfortunately the server reports that either the file does not exist or I do not have permission to access it.

My guess is that one problem may be that the surface normals of components of the model are not pointing in the right directions. Celestia does not draw surfaces which have surface normals pointing away from the viewpoint. i.e. if they're supposedly on a side of an object which is facing away from the viewpoint and thus hidden. Most non-realtime renderers (and some inefficient realtime renderers) draw all surfaces, regardless of the direction of the surface normal. They draw closer surfaces later, so that they hide more distant surfaces. As a result, designers often don't notice that they've messed up a model's surface normals while editing it.

To find out if this is the case, in Anim8or select "point edit mode", select "edit surface" then type a Ctrl-A (select all). Surfaces pointing toward the viewpoint will be drawn yellow. Surfaces pointing away from the viewpoint will be drawn blue. You'll have to "flip the normals" (one of the Edit menu's options) of the surfaces which are incorrectly blue (incorrectly facing away) to be yellow (facing toward the viewpoint). Sometimes selecting "fix normals" (another Edit menu option) will repair many of them.

Thanks for all your help, I will try that.