I do Archviz and I have been trying and failing to UV map and lightmap some .3ds furniture models in Blender and export as .fbx
I use smart project for the UV map create a new map and use Lightmap pack in Blender for the lightmap UV.
My issues are overlapping UV’s and sometimes UE4 won’t import the .fbx and gives an error no triangles even though the model is all triangles.
I’m about to give up on UE4 as I can’t afford 3DS or to buy assets pre mapped for UE4.
i think thats your problem, while you can do fantastic arch vis with UE4 you have to remember its a game engine, in this case your content needs to be uvw mapped accordingly.
your main uv channel can have over-lapping uv’s (stacked islands) but your second channel (lightmap) must have unique uv’s , also its best to have as few seams (islands) as posible , not easy and most likely the most hated job in the 3d world
For the lightmaps -> take a look at this tutorial: ://
For the UV map -> (best tutorial)
Also make sure that you triangulate your mesh before you export it
+use the latest blender version
Have you used Blenders Lightmap pack uv unwrap? It looks like it does a good job and makes unique islands separated from each other.
When I lightmap a high poly sofa as an example lightmap unwrap is the only viable option for me - I can’t spend hours lightmapping a piece of furniture. I may just have to go with a purchased library of assets.
There is a bug either in Blender or UE4 the meshes are all triangles and I get the error. I suspect it’s Blender…
never use blenders “lightmap pack” option, the UV’s it creates are no good for use with UE4, the “smart UV” option sometimes works ok for quickly creating lighmaps but it can cause lighting/shadowing errors in UE4 so I wouldn’t recommend that method either.
the best option for creating lightmap UV’s in blender is to “mark seams” use the “unwrap” option and then you might need to move the islands slightly to make sure there is enough padding between them but it gives the best results and doesn’t take that long to do it.
Something else to look at is the import of the .3ds file into Blender. Try to remove doubles from the model, and as said, never use the “lightmap pack”. It’s useless.
Also, can you upload the original model so we can look at it?
Where did you get it? Maybe we can get it from there.
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Third sofa from the left where it says technical drawings, click the download link to get a popup with options for the download. ://www.bebitalia/en/products/sofas-simplex-219.html
Even so I’m not sure it solves my long term problem which is fees are too low to unwrap manually every piece of furniture and item in a room.
