I’m having an issue with Mesh Distance Fields- sort of greasy, splotchy shadows that (from my research) are a common symptom of meshes that aren’t playing nice with MDF generation. However, as I’ve dug deeper into the issue, I’m coming to believe that, in my case, that’s not what’s going on- For a couple of reasons.
Firstly, the artifacts are present even on the default Material Sphere- If you look carefully, you’ll see some subtle splotching on the sphere- that’s not image compression, that’s actually in-engine. It’s pretty obvious in motion.
I’ve never seen any other images of Mesh Distance Fields that look like this. But then there are meshes where the effect is even more extreme, like this:
I have tested many individual meshes. None have holes, or are scaled irregularly. No mesh-specific MDF settings seem to have any impact on the resulting fields, aside from straight up disabling them. Another thing: this error has been present since I started the project back in like 4.24 or 4.25, and it’s still here in 5.0. It doesn’t go away when I build the project either.
I’ve been struggling with this issue for a couple of years now. Any help, or insights would be amazing.
Could be a few things, the size of the meshes, how they are constructed, or the the mesh distance field resolution needs to be turned up.
Mesh Distance fields tend to work best with modular scenes made up of around 5x5x5 meter or less static meshes. Also meshes tend to work better if they aren’t too concave and are solid air tight meshes with no open edges.
Changing the size and construction of meshes has no effect on the results of the MDF. I’ve also experimented with MDF resolution, which has done nothing. Also, all of my meshes are airtight and the first, third, and last mesh that I showed are fully convex.
As mentioned in the original post, I already tried all the mesh-specific MDF settings including two-sided distance field generation. It had no or minimal impact on the results
When you tried this, did you actually press “apply”? Because if you just save the mesh, it will not regenerate the distance field, you need to actually press the apply button first.
It was the same person who made all the meshes. I’ve inspected them carefully and I haven’t found any meaningful differences- no doubled up vertices or anything weird like that. Reimporting them doesn’t work either unfortunately
Update: I recently imported a kitbashed mesh (so it does break MDF best practices) and the MDF artifacts are now moving. They sort of wiggle back and forth and ripple along the artifacted sections of the mesh.
