Certainly No Premier Inn. . .

So after trying to model some more of the Arcadian ground floor, I have found myself running into several technical hitches. It was going well at first, save a few geometry issues. For some reason though, the walls of the hotel were not interacting with light correctly. In 3DS Max, these show up as planes with a black to white gradient (why, I have no idea. . .) and after importing the hotel into Unity, the player can directly see this problem with the flashlight. Obviously this is a huge problem as lighting is a key element in setting up an authentic and unsettling atmosphere, which is not being helped by walls showing up as pitch black. Here are some screenshots to illustrate my problem. . .

This is not acceptable in the scene I am trying to create, and puts me in a difficult position. It is not an easy fix, but the more I work on it, the more 'dodgy' planes seem to occur. Clearly something has gone belly up somewhere down the line, and I am now contemplating using another method to model this ground floor. It was a method Scott and I were using in our group project, using simple planes and organising them into tunnel shapes we needed before making them into prefabs. As the hotel is quite linear in it's design, I would only have to make 3 - 4 prefabs I imagine, but then I could slot them together such as in Tetris. A prefab for the corner parts, a prefab for the longer corridor sections and so on. This would somewhat limit how the textures come out but it might speed things up in the long run, with a deadline to keep and all. I will start making some prefabs, and should be able to tell quite quickly whether or not this is a suitable substitute. Areas such as the reception area can still be made in 3DS Max, but as the reception area is not integral to the horror setting as such, I am approaching that as a lower priority model until I can organise the bare bones of the level which is of course the hotel corridors, where the player will be interacting in the most.