Hello, I have been making modular components for robots for a while now, I make them up individually, unwrap and texture them, and then fit them together in different combinations and rig them up in 3ds for animation, using 3dsmax 2015 and 3dcoat as a means to both model and unwrap the models, I did this for two previous models, but for a recent one when I tried to import it, it gave me the “degenerate tangent base error”.
This occurred after I have already exported the same model and uploaded it to sketchfab (Sketchfab), all the smoothing and unwraps are correct, they had to be to upload to sketchfab, all the UVs are fine, and yet when I import into Unreal Engine it completely destroys those UVs (checked them tons of times), and completely gets rid of the smoothing and also gives me the degenerate tangent error, I really have no idea what’s going on, especially considering I am doing the exact same thing that has worked in the past.
The message warning about Degenerate Tangents isn’t a bug, but is just indicating that the UV is not unwrapped properly so you’ll get this warning because the tangents are not calculated correctly because of it.
By Default the importer uses MikkTSpace tangent space which is more accurate, but you can switch to the old built-in method that won’t report any tangent issues since it uses a different method of calculation. You can do this by switching it in the import options or going to the Build Settings in the Static Mesh Editor and unchecking MikkTSpace and then hitting apply.
This has been pretty well covered in other questions on the AnswerHub and Forums.
