I am having trouble with the window areas on this model. In blender, the edges are smooth and it looks good:
In unreal engine, it gets a little jagged and it seems to indent the cylinder beside the windows:
What is happening? How can I fix it?
On export pick Smoothing => Face
And on import turn off face smoothing calculations and just choose to import them.
Be sure to have good topology of the mesh too. You may have some double vertices (try Merge by Distance with small value)
I already had smoothing set to face in blender for export. Thats the sole reason this model ended up in blender to begin with, because UE was complaining about smoothing groups on import. It was exported to fbx from fusion 360 then imported to blender (for the face smoothing) then imported into UE.
I could not find anything about smoothing in the import window in Unreal Engine. Is it called something else?
I merged by distance in blender (0.001), and no vertices were removed.
The topology is bad. You need to learn about how to manage edge loops and mesh flow.
Do you have any pointers for tutorials or information to help me out with that? I know very little about that kind of stuff. I only know a little about 3d modeling from using fusion 360 for 3D printing.
Try getting it closer to this flow.
Avoid triangles and ngons (polygons more than 4 points).
Tri’s are ok in some situations but if you plan any type of subdivision, they will cause pinching. They can also disrupt shading.
It’s a bit of an art form in itself. I learned it over the years by practice, but I’ll try to find a tutorial online that may give you some clues.
These seem pretty extensive. It would be best to find some with the most common edge loop redirections for problematic mesh flow. With time it becomes second nature how to cut along the mesh to keep the flow.
https://cgcookie.com/posts/guide-to-clean-topology
This pintrest board has many examples of loop flows
Thank you! I will look into those and see if I can get this sorted with that information. I appreciate your VERY quick responses and detailed info.
You can also look into retopolgy tools that can do this stuff automatically. But they are usually paid plugins. The best retopo tool is the one used in zbrush, it’s available as a plugin for blender. I’ll add a link if I find it.
Edit:
This is the remesher that is used in zbrush called Quad Remesher: