When Things vanish....

During the texturing of my engines I noticed that as I rotated the model some of the engine blades would disappear. I soon realised that because I had created my engine blades with planes that they only had normals on one side.


A Normal is a marker on a side of an object that lets the renderer know how light would react on the surface and also helps tell the system what needs to be rendered in a particular shot.


To correct this problem I was advised that the shell modifier would cure this by adding normals to both sides of the blade.

Below you have the before and after shots for the use of the shell modifier. If you look closely or enlarge the photos you can see in the bottom right hand corner off the blades a couple are missing in the top photo but not in the second.