I’m using datasmith and 3Ds max to import geometry into my scene. I’m not sure what is causing the issue, but some parts of my scene have very dark lightmaps after render. It’s very strange, an issue I haven’t seen before. It’s worth mentioning I’ve had some luck with flipping normals on some objects, but there are still many that refuse to change.
Also, this happens in every scene I import it to, I’ve done fresh scenes, with different settings, different lights etc, always the same issue with the same objects.
The most common reason for a mesh to appear black after you have Built the Lights is that you forgot to UV unwrap it. Open it in the mesh editor and check how many UV’s there are. There should be 2, UV0 and UV1.
Flipped faces/polygons can cause this issue… overlapping/non existing lightmap uvs too…
Using 2 sided materials usually helps but can screw up the realistic lighting…
I don’t think UVs will be the issue as I’m using datasmith to export the project. I think datasmith should take care of those unwrap issues automatically unless its a bug in the most recent version perhaps?
You were right, the issue seemed to be normals/flipped faces. It was a buggy mess for some reason, I was able to fix each face with a number of methods. For anyone else who has the same issue, these things fixed some of the errors:
Applying a mesh smooth modifier with 0 iterations.
Selecting all with element, then flipping normals in whilst in element, then selecting faces, and flipping back with faces.
exporting as an obj and re-importing
clearing the smoothing groups
and lastly (most strangely) adding geometry in (like a swift loop) and then deleting the added geometry.
I’ve never had quite this much problems with normals like this, but I think I’m finally finished fixing it all up. Thanks for the help
