Hello there. I'm running into a problem with one of my creation and was hoping someone might have an idea of how I could fix this or maybe something else I could do to achieve the look I'm trying to create. Hopefully I'll explain myself well enough, my mesh newbiness might start showing...

I've been working on a set of custom meshes that look like cockpits of ships from Star Wars. It's all been going pretty well except for when it comes to the canopies. My original idea was taking the canopy, duplicating it, reversing the faces of one of them to use as the interior, and then texturing the interior and exterior of the canopy differently so the exterior would look different from the interior. Well, it turns out that didn't work at all and while both do appear they appear over each other and one side can really only be seen with just the edges of the other side. Reversing the faces usually works for me but I suppose it's not in this case because the canopy has some transparency. Or at least I assume that's why it's not working.

So here's what I did at first... I made the object, cut out the canopy and made that a separate layer. I then duplicated that one canopy layer, reversed the faces on it so it would be "inside", and textured both the outside canopy layer and inside canopy layer differently. Both layers are in the same position as each other, one just has the faces reversed. In SimPE I added an alpha layer to make the windows of the canopy transparent while living the canopy braces solid. It looked okay when I previewed the model in SimPE but when I loaded up The Sims 2 to see how it was looking I got this...


So, what am I showing? Well, the picture is showing that the interior canopy layer is appearing through the exterior layer and the exterior layer can barely be seen except for a few small edges of light blue. The dark gray braces you see in the picture should be on the "inside" of the model to look like the interior of the canopy. My idea was that the canopy exterior would be on the outside of the object, visible from the outside, while the canopy interior would be under the exterior and visible from the inside (and hopefully from of it through the exterior windows if the camera was angled that way). That way it would look like the inside and outside of the cockpit.

Here is how the model looks in Milkshape. The black area on the model isn't anything I'm worried about, that's appearing just fine in-game, the canopy is the issue. As you can see here the exterior of the canopy (light blue braces) is visible as it should be...


Here is a picture zoomed to the inside of the cockpit object and with the canopy exterior layer turned off and only the canopy interior layer visible. As you can see in this picture, the interior canopy is textured differently than the exterior...


Here's another picture with a transparent texture (transparent PNG) with both the canopy interior and exterior layers on. The interior layer is visible from the outside and only a little bit of the exterior layer is visible. If I change the order of the layers around in MilkShape and bring the exterior canopy layer up above the interior canopy layer the exterior becomes visible but hides the interior. So it's just the other way around, one is hidden through the other...


And here is one more picture with the same transparent PNG texture but with the exterior layer on and the interior layer off...


In case it helps this is what the finished exported mesh looks like. The mesh is three parts (cloned from the Musee Public sculpture). "Flowers" is the canopy (interior and exterior, originally two layers that were merged), "vase" is the cockpit itself and "groundshadow" is just the groundshadow part from the cloned mesh...


I did try making the interior layer a little bit smaller than the canopy exterior layer so that both layers weren't layered exactly over each other but that didn't make any difference, though it did pull the interior away a little it was still visible through the exterior layer and the exterior layer still couldn't be seen. I also tried making the canopy interior a different part (I made it the "groundshadow" layer) but that didn't do much, either.

So my question is this: is there a way to make it so a texture will only appear on one side of a face and the other side be invisible? If not can anyone think of some other way I could achieve the look I'm going for with the interior of the canopy having a different texture than the exterior of the canopy? Any help would be much appreciated!

Thank you for your time.