I’ve been using C4D even more than usual lately, so I’ll add my two cents:
- If you’re building with procedural shapes (lathe, extrusion, loft, etc (AND YOU SHOULD BE THEY ARE GREAT)) turn on “backface culling” for your viewport. Most of the procedural shapes need either their hull or cap normals flipped and they all have checkboxes with which to do this.
1.a. Just as an aside, you have weird disappearing geometry even after flipping normals be aware that C4D doesn’t always like all of your values on procedural shapes to be round numbers. Try adding .001 to a rotation or position value and see if that helps. Same deal for booleans and procedural shapes. This is the worst bug ever but it’s easily accommodated.
- Smoothing-friendly import settings in UE: turn OFF normal calculations in your build settings for your C4D-originating mesh in UE. This is the only way to preserve your phong smoothing. Ignore UE warnings about a lack of smoothing groups.
2.a. Also consider turning off “remove degenerates”, particularly if you know your mesh is clean and tidy. This sometimes solves problems with UE messing up carefully cultivated normals.
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Apply at least one material to EVERYTHING. Do it. You want to do this. Also make sure everything has a UV map. Without a material a mesh won’t have a UV map. Also if some polygons in your mesh aren’t represented in the UV map UE will ignore them when doing a lighting UV layout. This most often happens if you have weirdo geometry passing through C4D as an import pipeline step.
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Go nuts with polygon-selection materials. These are great. These are better than individual meshes per material.
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Check your UVs. Quite often the default layouts are undesirable, so at the least go into the UV edit layout and fit all of the polygons to the canvas. If you’re not manually unwrapping, consider letting C4D do a nice programmatic UV layout for you.
If you follow these steps you’ll get great results. If there’s something wrong with your models, chances are it’s covered by an item in this list.
C4D and UE DO work great together but you’ve got the triple check your normals, UVs and materials.