Tutorial originally posted on Fileplanet. Mirrored here for archival purposes. Originally written by Chris Hedberg
How to Make a Fence
(Or, What Transparency Means To Me)
Fences, windows and other translucent brushes are 3D polies with all of the sides except one of them hidden. Here are your steps for creating a fence:
1) Build a standard "empty room" map op open one you've previously prepared.
2) Create your "fence" brush. You'll want it to be thin (4 or 8 units) so that it ain't too obvious that the player's really running into a thick brush.
3) Apply the fence texture to it. In Shogo, you can use textures\Shapes\Fence1, for example. This texture's already set up to be translucent.
4) Select your fence brush and right-click it. Select "Bind to..." and bind to a WorldModel (or a Door or DestructableDoor). You've just tied the brush to an object so that it's capable of translucency.
5) In the Nodes view, find the newly created brush and Door object you just made. You can do this by unselecting (using U), switching to the Nodes tab and then selecting your fence brush in the 3D preview window. Make sure you select both the Door entity and your fence brush (which you bound to it as a child object) before you go on.
6) Switch to the Properties tab and set the Translucent property = True. The brush that forms the fence will now be translucent in-game when you run the level.
Added refinements:
-Apply the Invisible texture (located in the root of the Textures directory tree) on all but one side of the fence so that it doesn't appear multi-layered. If you don't, each side of the brush that makes up the fence will be visible through the other sides. It generally looks bad but can be cool if used right.
-Turn off the BoxPhysics property on objects that are irregular in shape (an L-shaped fence section, a fence that bends) to get a closer-fitting bounding box. If you don't do this, then you end up with a square box that surrounds the whole of your new object. Sometimes that makes it impossible for the player to walk into areas that they obviously should be able to. There's a performance hit, but only a small one. If your object is square, you won't need to do this.
If you want to see an example of all this stuff in action, there's a Shogo map (19_Rendezvous.ED) among the single-player sample maps in the Shogo source that has a fence in it using all the steps described above.
