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Lightmap Woes

Development Discussion Content Creation
#1

Hey all,

Having a bit of trouble getting this model I made in Maya to look normal in UE4.

I’m not even sure if this is a lightmap issue to be honest. I always struggle with lightmaps so that’s my go to problem but I’ve never had things look this bad in editor coming out of Maya. Usually even meshes with bad lightmaps look ok until the lighting is built - no so with this one. The marks in the mesh seem to correspond to the triangulation that happens coming out of Maya.

Any thoughts?

#2

It’s a smoothing issue–also, you need to make sure that the edges on the outside are connected to the inside, otherwise it will triangulate the polygons in a way that can cause problems like that.

#3

I’m not sure what you mean by the edges on the outside being connected to the inside.

Taking apart such a simple shape seemed fairly straight forward to me but I think I have a fundamental misunderstanding about the proper process. I was trying to keep the front and rear main seems together and then the edges together.

#4

It’s okay to have N-gons in 3d modeling software in some cases, but if you’re gonna import your model in game engine - make sure you have ONLY triangles and quads. Some engines won’t recognize N-gons at all, some will try to fix this problem, but it is definitely is not okay to let this happen. Quadify or/and triangulate your model before export

#5

So I seem to have solved the issue.

Steps:
Triangulated in maya.
Exported to FBX but unchecked smooth mesh and smoothing groups.
Imported to UE4.
Ugliness solved.

Can anyone give me an explanation of why this worked? I thought we were supposed to leave smoothing groups checked when exporting.

#6

You probably didnt have import normals option in the import dialog box.

#7

Thanks for your help guys. :slight_smile: