I guess this question is a two-parter, with an opinion portion: Is it possible to shoot portals through an emancipation grill while retaining it's other effects, and if so, would that be too confusing to someone who may expect the grill to not allow portal-gun-beam-blasts to pass through it? It is fairly functional at the moment, but I'm curious about alternate solutions.

Secondly, rotating panels are a bit of a frustration to me right now. I have quite a few of them set up, with portalable material as one brush and non-portalable as another, then they both flip over together, and they "work," but they only allow placement of portals in a single orientation. I have them on the floor and ceiling, so this is less than optimal. I'm definitely considering just using automatic portal placement on these (as well as the above e-grill issue), but I'd like to do without if it's reasonable (the auto-placing still just feels wrong to me).

I also am not sure how to rectify the situation where the lighting of the panels is based on their initial position and not changed when they rotate around, I've put some lights in the little cubbies that are built behind them, but they generate pretty uneven light - is there a better solution than just manually tweaking the "cubby lighting" to make them pretty before they pop out?

EDIT: Also, they're currently set up to rotate and freeze when Pressed, then rotate back and freeze when UnPressed, which makes them jump to the beginning of an animation if you change (Pressed/UnPressed) states and interrupt their current animation. Is there a way to smooth that out? Maybe grab the current animation frame, and set the reverse animation to start on the corresponding frame? This is definitely less important than the other two panel issues...

Thirdly (lazily, I haven't looked very much into this, but if you want to encourage my lack of research, feel free to respond), as an alternative to panels I have some brushes that are pulled away to reveal white panels underneath, but need to remove the portals placed on the "under-panels" when the brush re-covers them. I imagine this is fairly simple, but again, haven't looked quite yet.

Thanks for any help you guys can offer, I look forward to sharing this thing with you soon - once I get it playing as smoothly as possible. Gameplay/puzzle first, prettiness second.

KBG

To prevent the placement of portals in the wrong place
Info placement helper.

To prevent portal placement to appear in the wrong places
Func no portal volume

Can I just activate and deactivate "Func_portal_novolume" to clear an area of portals? I don't really know how that will work, but if you say yes I can play around with it.

As for clarifying:
This is how my (ceiling and floor) rotating panels currently allow portal placement (two M's represents ONE portal), vertical orientation only -
__ _
|_| |_|
|M______| |_|
|M______| |_|
|_| |___M_|
|___| |___M___|

__ _
|_| |_|
|M| |_|
|M| |_|
|_| |_M_____|
|_| |_M_____|

but I want them to allow ANY orientation, just based on where the shooter is shooting them from -

__ _
|M_| |_|
|M__| |_|
|_| |___M M|
|_| |_|
|_| |_|

_ _
|_| |_|
|_| |_M_____|
|_M_____| |_M_____|
|M______| |_|
|_| |_|

Hopefully this helps, and hopefully this was the part that was confusing... (edited to fix the diagrams, just collapsed when built with "spaces")

EDIT: Oh, and I don't need the portals to rotate AFTER they are on the wall, just be able to be placed from a variety of angles such that the "bottom" of the portal is created nearest the user, and the "top " furthest away - like a standard ceiling or floor portal.

Hopefully this makes things pretty clear.

Metal grate fills the purpose on problem 1 just fine, thanks for that.