Materials not projecting correcly on models from blender

Hi all,

Complete beginner here. I’m trying to make a model of the house we’re building and am running into problems with materials which completely baffle me. I added some material slots, for example to represent a floor, and tried to add a wood material. However it stays black, whilst a cube with the same MI looks absolutely fine. See below. The floor that the cube is sitting on should have the same appearance.

I wondered if it was related to the slots, so I tried to add a material to a simple mesh as well. This shows the texture, but it’s like it’s projected at a funny angle. See below - once again the cube and the pathway have exactly the same material applied and once again, it looks fine on the cube, but very odd on the pathway,

Pathway.jpg

I tried to look at the meshes in the unreal editor and the normals etc seem okay. These meshes don’t have any UV maps (because I’m still learning Blender too) but I was hoping this wasn’t necessary to do a simple planar mesh)

Thanks in advance - I’m getting very frustrated.

If you really don’t want to use UV mapping you can try to use the “WorldAlignedTexture” or “WorldCoordinate3Way” function. Look at the documentation for more information on how to use it: Texturing | Unreal Engine Documentation

the best thing for you to do, is to start learning UV mapping while your models are still simple. a lot of the students at uni come in with sculpting and intermediate modeling skills, but never learned UVing because they poly paint all their work in zbrush ect. when they come to realize they need full uv’s for the projects at uni, they get overwhelmed by the complexity of the model and don’t know where to even start, and chaos ensues. For simple models its as easy as selecting a face and pressing a button to uv map it, stitching uv’d face shells together is also one button and will teach you the best places to put seams. i haven’t used blender in like 5 years (i use maya) but from what i can tell it uses a seam based uv system, where you select the edges you want to be seams and it does the rest like Unfold 3D/rizomUV.

did you find your answer?.. you ‘have’ to have a UV or the material doesn’t know where to go… blender28 is now new again and working on integration with UE (i hope)… but for now just make your materials in UE

Okay thanks! I think I need to redesign my level a bit then. Currently I have one mesh per floor for four houses. UV unwrapping it so every house can have different floors etc will be a nightmare.