I got this problem with trying to get my normals correct. I’ve been building a house of cards, and I noticed that one side of the playing cards only displays as black. Just a matter of inverting the normals, I thought. But that still only gets me part of the way there. If anyone knows what is going on, I would greatly appreciate any help.
Are you card planes or cubes with a really small thickness?
try removing smooth from Tool shelf…
They are cubes that I scaled way down. I already thought about turning off the visibility on the Subsurf modifier, but that doesn’t help.
Check normals again. Side panel (When you press N) there is a category in edit mode that says “normals”. Two icons below. Click them and blue lines appear on your model in edit mode. These show you the direction of the normals. The CTRL N shortcut just recalculates outside. This tends to work but sometimes it may not depending on your mesh. Under “mesh” menu in edit mode you will find “normals” you can flip any idividual face around as needed.
Also check that you have no faces on one side actually poking through to the other.
Check also for any issue with your mesh, overlapping faces, internal faces etc. These tend to show up with a sub surf.
Also if you took a Cube and flatten it (make thinner). You can select each corner (corners relating to the thin edges only). Select the edges here and in edge select mode and press W then “bevel” from menu. In the left hand panel you can change the amount to something very small. Just ensuring the corner of you cards are slightly rounded. Now move two edges (or scale on appropriate axis) to make the thin cube card shaped. Now set shading to smooth and add an edge split modifier. Change the degree angle to about 60. This will give you the shape that you want for a playing card wihout using a sub surf etc.
I managed to fix the normals using the above method. ‘Recalculate normals’ does very little, so I mainly have to select each face and invert the normals. However, the cards still do not display correctly. I may try remodeling without subsurf, but that doesn’t seem to be it. I could apply the modifier and see if that helps. I don’t want to use a 2-dimensional plane, although a real playing card would have almost no depth, so I could probably use that just fine if the plane renders two-sided. I don’t think I could texture the reverse side, though.
Aside from the display issues that you can get with using the texture shaded view, how do they render?
