So I’ve been creating some animations for a skinned mesh, and came across an issue.
In order to maintain shape and avoid too much clipping, morph targets are applied to the mesh on a few bones. In Maya, where the animations are created, these targets automatically adjust based on bone position, and the morph values are exported with the animation.
The problem is that these morph targets cause lighting bugs like the one you see above.
I’ve looked into this issue, and all I can find is an offhand comment that this might be related to “locked” vertices in Maya. So I opened up the model, selected the entire mesh and selected Normals>Unlock Normals. Sure enough, this caused the normals to change on every part of the mesh except the face (which also has morph targets that don’t cause this issue).
So I re-exported the mesh, and attempted to import it into Unreal. At which point, Unreal claimed that the mesh had no skeleton, and would not let me import it. I tried everything I could, but I could not get the mesh to re-import.
My question is quite simple: how can I fix these lighting errors?