FBX created in maya 2018 has darker lower half when imported

Development Pipeline & Plugins
, ,
1

Hi,

I’m having a weird issue with meshes imported from maya. No matter what shape, the side of mesh appears to be divided in half, with a lighter top half and darker lower half. Hopefully helpful notes:

  • Doesn’t appear to be material or UV related.
  • The dark half can still be lit but needs a stronger light to the top half.

I have attached a zip containing my project and fbx, hopefully I’ve made a simple mistake!

2

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Import attached fbx into unreal with default import settings
  2. View imported mesh, observe lighter top half.
3

Hey there! I took a look at the mesh in the provided project and it looks like the issue is related to the normals of the mesh that’s being imported. If I import the mesh into Maya, it looks like you’ve got hard normals at all the different edges, so the verts are effectively being duplicated. For some reason, though, Unreal doesn’t want to treat them that way on import. Because there aren’t a lot of edge loops for the transition, that’s why you’re getting the dark edge halfway down the table.

If I disable “Recompute Normals” in the LOD0 build settings, I get the results I think you’re looking for in both Nanite and non-Nanite. Give that a shot and let me know how it goes!

4

Thanks Matt, that’s fixed it.