Hello folks. I’m a rather inexperienced UE5 user, and am having trouble trying to create a large environment (~29mi x 29mi) for a ~500’ (170m?) flyover.
I imported a bunch of very simple Maya-created FBXs into UE5.3. They are buildings of varying sizes and shapes, but very simple geometrically, based essentially on cubes with simple, 4-sided extrusions for windows. However, UE does not like them.
There are about 18 or so variations of these simple buildings. They have been duplicated dozens of times (and therefore many share the same UV space) to modularly create towns of varying sizes.
The problem is that they are rendering in the weirdest way. The lighting on them is not right after I apply textures (but not before). I created color, roughness and normal maps in Painter. In Painter everything looks good. But, in UE, the color map looks pale compared to its Painter counterpart. The normal map, once applied, does all sorts of weird shading / lighting things to the buildings. I can provide screen captures.
Any idea what’s going on? I get a number of normal and tangent error messages when importing into UE.
It doesn’t work. It’s because the lighting is all wrong. Basically you can use HDR for the horizon and sky, but never the ground, it will always look wrong.
Here, I put the landscape back, but keep the HDR for the rest
More believable. I know I need to get the camera at head height, but I can’t because I don’t have a terrain that fits the buildings. All I did was use this great asset
Thank you so much for taking the time to put that together.
I will be honest and say that last night I started to suspect that it was in the lighting as well. YOu, however, showed me some specifics that could prove very helpful.
(The ground in the images was untextured… it was just the default thing that UE slaps onto meshes. Texturing that ground realistically will be the next challenge after I get the lighting and buildings’ appearances corrected.)
Thanks again for all your work on this stranger’s behalf.
Hey… I just wanted to mention that in the original UE screen captures, there was no HDR backdrop. Only UE’s native lighting tools: directional light, skylight, clouds, sky atmosphere, skysphere and fog.
An HDR backdrop creates an improvement, but it’s still not quite ready for primetime. So still plugging away here.
Going to abandon height maps on the buildings (whether displacement, NormalfromHeight, or just plain Normal), since no technique is looking good in UE (though they do look at least usable in Maya and Painter… too bad Maya could not withstand the addition of a million trees).
Yeah, those were the Painter renders. I was trying to compare them to the UE5 renders. The Painter renders are the ones I’m trying to get much closer to. UE is having problems with every kind of height map I throw at it for some reason, whether it be normal maps, displacement maps, or my using the normalfromheight node. So, time for a plan B. I could model the bricks into those buildings, but that would be way too time-consuming and, I think, unnecessary.
In UE5 I was using the native lighting setup, as I described earlier. That is what you are looking at in those initial screen captures I sent. I do like the way HDRs look in UE, but I think I’m just going to “paint” the bump into the color, since we’re going to be between 500’ and 1,000’ in a flyover. If this was ground-level, I’d be in trouble.
Not being more adept at UE (I come from a Maya-based VFX background), and with a deadline a few months away and only a few hours per week to work on this thing, I got to make compromises.
