Hi there everyone! I switched to the unreal engine a couple of days ago and I’ve been trying to create some assets with Sketchup, I’ve made quite a detailed mesh and although I thought I managed to import it just fine (I used UE to generate UV maps). It still appears black after building for some reason. Setting the mesh to ‘movable’ instead of ‘static’ sort of fixes the issue, expect the lighting still doesn’t look realistic and even though the material is pure white it still looks blue. Also I’m not planning on making this mesh move during gameplay so I don’t see a reason to set it to ‘movable’ instead of ‘static’ because I’m assuming that, that will just take up more valuable processing power. I’ve got the feeling that I’m making a very basic mistake, anybody willing to help me out?
The automatic lightmap UV generation option in UE4 is not a complete feature, it takes the existing UV’s and then uses an algorithm to flatten it out and pack it. If you don’t have fairly correct UV’s in the first place, it won’t improve things. Also, make sure your lightmap resolution is adjusted, the default is 64 which is usually too low.
Unfortunately Sketchup to UE4 is a very problematic workflow mainly due to the way Sketchup creates UVs, ie, it doesn’t keep UVs in 0,1 space so they’re more or less worthless in any other environment.
On top of that, Sketchup tends to create duplicate vertices everywhere on the mesh and it doesn’t do a good job of managing the normals on faces (double check that the faces on your mesh are pointing outwards). For now, my company has been exporting Sketchup geometry (with a quad based workflow in mind while creating the mesh) to Blender for processing and UV-unwrapping. I generally have to remove all duplicates, verify the faces are pointing the right direction, add details (chamfering and rounding corners/edges) and unwrap UV.
It’s not a great pipeline unfortunately but when you get Sketchup -> Blender -> UE4 dialed in you can use it to get real-world measurements and scaling for the larger aspects of your meshes and use another program to add details and process it for engine use. For example we model two separate models in Sketchup, a detailed BIM-oriented model for construction documents and a quad-based shell of the exterior. I take the shell model into blender and add props and other details for archviz rendering.
I wish we could do it all in Sketchup and achieve both precision and aesthetics but for now it’s not something that seems to be feasible.
Feel free to reach to me for help or if you have anymore questions about this workflow as we’ve done some fairly extensive testing with various methods and plugins to make this a bit more palatable.