Hi, I attached a screenshot of what I’m talking about.
I’m really new to Unreal and this is for a coursework project so I’m stressing that I seem to be already in over my head.
My material just looks really terrible. Does anyone have any tips about making any of the textures better? Maybe the AO or Normal map are too harsh?
It might just be the lighting in my scene, I used the default FPS template so I haven’t added any lights myself yet.
I turned up scalability settings and this fixed the horrible jagged edges I had but yeah in general everything looks pretty rubbish.
Happy to answer any specific questions, sorry if I’ve missed out any really obvious information that I’m supposed to include.
Thank you.
Learning how to use UE4 can be quite a difficult since it requires you to have knowledge in a wide area skill sets, it can be quite overwhelming! I’ll try to break things down for you.
The reason why your material looks different on your Mesh VS the Material Viewport is due to the UV mapping on the meshes. Your mesh is only displaying a section of your texture, making it look really stretched.
There’s 2 different solutions that you could do.
In Maya
Change your Mesh’s UV in Maya so that it can occupy more of your texture space. A common technique for simple objects such as walls is to extend the UV past the bounds so that the texture will repeat.
In UE4 (recommended)
2. In your material set up, click on your TexCoord node and change the UTiling and VTiling to a higher number. Change it to something like 3 or 4, depending on what you’re after, that should fix it. What this does it changes the scaling of your textures so you can repeat or stretch a texture.
Some general tips with your assets!
In physically based rendering, your roughness should only be a value between 0 and 1. So I would recommend changing your Roughness value to something like 0.7. Generally you do not need a specular map in PBR apart from very specific situations, so I would recommend getting rid of that too, just leave the spec slot empty (leaving slots empty just leaves it at default values).
In terms of lighting a scene, I always put a Directional light and a Sky Light. Depending on your scene you might want to do baked lighting (static) or Dynamic lighting. Baked lighting is cheaper and tends to look nicer, so it’s good for showing off environments and stuff.
Hope this helps a bit! If you have any more questions regarding 3D modelling, Unreal Engine etc. I’m more than happy to answer them, good luck!
Adding to what Ricewagon said in response to the UV mapping,
I agree that the walls are best extended past the UV space to occupy the amount of space it takes up in world space. For instance, if I have a wall that is 300cm in height, and 600 in width, then I’ll change the UV Grid in the UV Editor to match the settings. In Maya, you could change the “Length and width unit” amount to be “6.” One unit would equate to 100cm, so change the Unit amount to match the longest or tallest part of you wall. Once it’s at 6 units (your “grid lines every ___ units” should still be at .1), and making sure that the “Grid Numbers” are checked to “On axes,” simply scale your Wall UVs to match its size in real world.
Firstly, you’d take the UV shell of your wall and change the pivot of it to be the bottom left corner of the shell, and then snap the whole shell into the corner at 0,0. Then simply snap the top edge of the wall shell to “3” on the number grid, and snap the width (right edge) of the wall down to “6.” This will mean that your wall’s UVs now take up real time space, and the material you apply to it and display as it was most likely intended.
Hi Ricewagon!
Sorry it’s been a while. I just want to say thanks so much for your kind reply before, it really did help me. My project ultimately didn’t go as well as I had hoped but now this year is over I’m looking forward to getting better at Maya and Unreal in my own time :).