I brought a high poly character model (robot) into Cinema from Fusion. It renders pretty nicely.
When I bring it into unreal, it renders black after lighting builds. I know this is has to do with the light maps / UV / baking etc, and I’ve been trying to look at videos on the right workflows for this.
I know there are a number of options (backing high res, then projecting onto low poly models? retopology?) but it’s all a bit beyond me.
My question is:
Where do I start to lear what I need to?
If someone can give me a super simple breakdown of steps (ie. 1. lower model topple / connect all objects) etc I’d appreciate it.
GL
p.s. I’m not making a heavy game, just a simple visualization, so if the engine can handle a single high poly model that’s OK.
The first question is to decide if you need baked lighting for your mesh–if it’s a robot and needs to be animated then you don’t need lightmaps since all of the lighting for it will be dynamic.
If you’re OK with the performance with the high-poly mesh, then you don’t need to do retopology. I’d do some things anyway just to go through and delete polygons that you don’t need or to remove loops that aren’t necessary, but doing retopology is really only necessary if you need good real-time performance.
For your lightmaps, you just need to have a second UV channel where everything is flattened, not overlapping, and fits in the 0-1 UV space. Some 3D programs have automatic UV flattening tools but usually they just look at the angles between polygons and split them when they’re beyond a certain angle. You might get an OK result using an automatic method, but most of the time you can get a better result by doing the lightmap UV’s manually. To do them well you just need to take a look at UV mapping tutorials for your 3D software. It’s not really difficult, once you’ve done it a bit you’ll have an understanding of where to place UV seams so that you have the least number of seams with the least amount of distortion when it’s flattened out. It just becomes tedious when you have to do the UV’s manually.