Am experimenting with DAZ3D to Unreal via Alembic. Am experiencing a problem with the resulting textures that are applied to the mesh. In the attached image you can see the result of an Alembic Static Mesh import (on the left, with black eyes) and an FBX import (on the right with white eyes).
The FBX import looks good. The Alembic import looks fine from a distance but has blockiness to the texture when viewed up close. At first I thought it was a smoothing problem but a simple matt texture is smooth. If one looks closely it looks like maybe the texture in each individual quad has been independently flipped. Note that both meshes are referencing the same material, also that creating a dedicated material for the face does not help. I have tried the standard transforms and various custom transforms on the import. I have tried various combinations of negative scaling in X, Y, X and flipping of the U and V. None have so far worked. Most make the problem worse. The Geometry Cache throws up the same problem but takes more time to experiment with.
Is this problem a bug or is there some combination of import transform that might fix the problem? Or am I barking up the wrong tree altogether?
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Ok. Did that. Case # 00132656. Did not find the experience all that great - seems to require more technical information than I can know. Also cannot now find the bug report to add some of the details I mentioned here… like that it came out of DAZ. Also note that I don’t know if this is a bug. For all I know I’m doing something wrong… seems like the process needs some kind of triage.
I have found a 2014 post on the DAZ forum relating to use of Alembic with Octane. The same issue. Seems to have been fixed in 2016 by exporting with “preserve subdivision surface”. Right now, this option results in ‘Failed to import… Failed to create asset’ and no additional details in the Output Log. OToy forum: OTOY Forums • View topic - OctaneRender™ Standalone 1.27 DAZ forum mentioning fix: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/529055/
Having created a Case in https://issues.unrealengine.com and received an email with the case number #00132656 I cannot track the issue. It does not show up in any search of either the case number or keywords ‘Alembic’ and ‘Blocky’. Hence I cannot add what might be useful information.