Help me before I jump off a bridge!!

[Arnold Grove]

Im migrating from LW to Max. Its going ok but Im hitting snags. Im trying to make a sofit for a drop ceiling.

 

Ive tried every method I know. Splines then sweep. I have polys crashing into one another and then they dont render w/ vray (and vray mat) and GI on. With a basic omni its fine.

 

Ive tried making long reqtangles from extrusions. Ive tried making simple boxes. Ive tried a boolean opp to join them. Ive even made one part of it..duplicated and then welding the vertices togther. Ive tried double sided mats...Im ready for the loony bin.

 

The best version (although Im sure modeled wrong) is the my first try. It requires a chamfer edge (inset) but the polys are gone when I render.

 

Ive tried subdividing. When I made one that looked fine I used a boolean for the little inset the polys dissappeard.

 

Ive worked on this for 4 days and Im stuck. Im ready to dive off a bridge in disgust. Can someone PLEASE look at my model, tell me what i did wrong and whay the F%$#&*^%k I have missing ploys.

 

I know the answer is right in front of me..maybe whay Im P%^&$#ED

 

I have it zipped for email..its a small file and to scale

 

thankyou

[Billabong]

im rendering right now, so i cant look at the file, but if you post an image of what you are doing,ill try and help

[Arnold Grove]

Ill keep trying to do that...my web host is down so i couldnt even zip it as a url..

 

Im pretty sure that its because of two ploys occupying the same space...overlapping. Where they overlap renders black. Its just a simple shape really. But Im having quite a time.

 

Ill keep trying to connect w/ host server.

[Billabong]

is this what you are trying to do

 

http://www1.rockwool.pl/graphics/RW-PL-implementation/aktualnosci/sofit/montaz/montaz8.jpg

[kippu]

i am game....shoot me an email ..kippu24@yahoo.co.in

[BrianKitts]

don't jump it's not worth it.....

[BrianKitts]

if your ceiling is pretty flat like brandon's image I would just do it with a texture and a bump map, otherwise I normally just do a flat plane with 2'x2'x.25" squares below the plane.

 

my new trick is to do drop ceilings with displacement mapping instead of geometry.... took some time to get the mapping setup, I'm still tweaking to get make the grid more of a reflective metal....but it works well for adding a drop ceiling into BIM models where someone gives you a flat ceiling with no modeled tiles. (see image)