Hi all, I’m new to modeling and unreal, and have tried for the first time to make flowers using opacity maps/planes.
However my flowers are appearing black or heavily shadowed. How can i remove these? I’d like them to have none or very little shadow on the plant itself but am happy for them to cast a shadow on the floor.
Is this an issue with my maya mesh? I don’t think the fbx export has any light data. Do i just need to fix or add lighting in unreal?
Please help, thank you for reading!
You’re using a subsurface or foliage shader, right? And you have not baked lighting? See if turning off Two Sided in the material gives you any more clues.
This looks to me like a normals issue. One way to debug this is Lit > Buffer Visualization > World Normal. Drag out a primitive cube to see the ground truth for what colorization should be for all polygon faces that are pointing in a particular direction.
You can also preview normals in the Static Mesh Editor for that asset, but it probably just looks like a mess. You might be able to recalculate normals in the Modeling mode, but that’s one more tool to learn. To fix this in Maya you would probably set the whole mesh to hard normals as a clean slate. Make sure you haven’t accidentally doubled any polygons and welded it together. Just use one plane per slice and rely on TwoSided in Unreal.