Ok. I get it.
I still need some practice on my unwrapping because I suck and still don’t fully understand how I’d unwrap this.
Yeah, UV unwrapping is a pain, and a lot of these arch viz assets you find online aren’t unwrapped well for games, and aren’t modeled well for games either. There’s tons of different ways to unwrap any asset, and there’s no hard rules, but there are a lot of guide lines, especially when working with light maps and games.
Yeah I’ve been doing digital tutors tutorials for the last few months that have helped heaps. Unwrapping is still one of my weak points but I’m getting better.
I’ve just learnt the basics of pelt mapping.
Did you create a seam along the edges to do that fixture, or did you just flatten and stitch?
I do my initial unwrap in 3DCoat, where you just have to mark where you want seams and hit unwrap. The results from 3DCoat are very quick, but it doesn’t do everything perfectly, so I have to take it back to my modeling application and fix and merge a few things.
I followed your walthrough but I must be missing something because when I look at the model in the editor I always see 1-2 pillows correct and the others like they have the normal flipped! to make more clear:
the “green pointed” is the one correct, the others are all flipped: if it wasn’t for the “drawstring” border I wouldn’t noticed it! I’ve already tried most of all possibilities: check the normals of high poly, low poly and cage (they are all correct); tried with many combinations of the swizzle coordinates (it moves the problem to other pillow but never more the 2 are correct at the same time) when baking the normals; tried (again) other softwares but nothing worked!
Quite tiring! ahahah
however thanks a lot for all the effort! your help here is really huge!
I’ll do it, but before I need to reach a result similar to the ZacD’s one or it won’t be useful! 
Check your vertex normals in your 3D modeling application, enable view normals. If you aren’t seeing any issues still, post the LP you made.
I’ve checked even those and they were correct! But I’ve made a discover: I tried to take the low poly and make it bigger, so that the low poly overlap only in few little parts the high poly (in your point 13 I thought you were meaning the cage had to be bigger, and infact I had not loss of detalis): doing so it works perfectly but now I have pillows overlapping each other because they are bigger than before! is this a compromise (so have I to find a low poly the most similar to the high poly, but not too much?) or still I’m doing wrong?
these are the low poly files I working on:
- the one overlapping but not working https://mega.nz/#!D9ckWZwI!kruQ3YkGQThBYBedmyH7VIdZP93bJK0LQwGmqrR0RW4
- and the one bigger and working https://mega.nz/#!e0VDiD4Q!IcoSoc0WE33P0UctFao2N7vlFAShhxs9KtN56L_J8Gc
(this last has only one channel because I made it fast, just to try, so I had to switch the channel of the normalmap inside the material)
I was looking even in polycount for infos and I’ve read about Handplane Baker: it seems nice and gave me normalmap really similar to xnormal! have you ever tried it?
Ok, I’ve taken a few more lessons on UnWrapping and I’ve seperated and managed to unwrap one of those individual curved pieces. But how the heck did you position all the little curved bits back in the same position as they were once you deleted them?? What a total pain!
Also, unrelated question: If you were to model a scene for a normal residential home and you wanted to be able to walk around in the backyard as well as inside, would you render two different scenes? Or would you do one giant model for both inside and outside?
Count the number of pieces around the mesh, divide by 360, duplicate with that rotation. I would probably model an interior and exterior separately until completely comfortable with lighting each on their own.
thanks for this thread. quick question, i have a hole in a bookshelf. is it clean enough to lay down its UVs like this? or is it better to lay it out like shown in the second image?
Distortion is fine, but the second one would pack better. 1 should ideally look more like a doughnut, but both options would work fine.
Hello, i export my model in fbx from MD5 then i import it into Blender 2.77a. I fixed the normals after i re-export always in fbx.
BLENDER, check the uvmap space and the uvmap(it’s very huge):
finally i import the fbx inside UE4.
UE4, check the uvmap space is smaller than the uvmap
lightmap, generate from UE4 in automatic:
Where is the problem? i don’t see the uvmap inside the MD5.
It’s alright if the UV0 goes outside of the 1,1 UV area, it wont show up in the preview, but it will texture fine.
I followed your steps and I’m pretty close. I think I messed up somewhere at 13 because my normals had some weird artifacts when I baked in Xnormal.
Anyway, in step 20 you mentioned to Recombine my meshes. So if I have a hi-poly, a low-poly and a cage - I should attach combine them all together using attach tool?
And mind elaborating what the point of the whole process is for? (creating a Low poly and a cage – what are we doing this for and what is going on?)
Like once the normals are baked from the hi-poly, what is the purpose of it? Couldn’t it be deleted?
It’s nice to hear you. Well done, but one question: is the lightmap correct? Because i had a hi-poly model, i don’t know how UE4 can do.
There’s a variety of baking artifacts so some pictures would help tell exactly what’s going on.
The high poly and cage can be be hidden or removed after a bake, all you need for UE4 is the low poly model. They are never really attached but they do need to be exported from the same location and should be basically overlapping.
The cage basically tells the baking engine where to look for details on the high poly to make, and how to handle the protection. There’s less skewing and you get a cleaner bake with a cage. Also cages help stop different exploded parts of a model from cross projecting onto each other.
When i export a model from Marvelous Designer, i lost some details. Why?
I exported in fbx and obj. In fbx i have a abnormal behavior in MD5, I’ve highlighted transform the mesh in a points cloud. I don’t know why.
If i export in obj i had that but MD5 see like a unique body and trasform all meshes in a unique mesh. Like before. Why!?
What’s the purpose of triangulating a mesh?
Is that something you do for the cage and low poly or just the cage?
You triangulate the low poly before making the cage. The reason you triangulate is because your modeling application, your baking application, and UE4 might triangulate a mesh in different ways, and you might get shading artifacts that look like an x on quads that were triangulated differently.
