Problem: Exporting 3DS sofa using UNWRAP to unreal engine 4

Hi guys im facing a problem with exporting a sofa from 3ds to unreal engine 4. my sofa has many polys and as a result it is having problems being baked in unreal engine 4. I have created 2 UV channels but the polygons are tiny. Im assuming that is an issue. When i then bring it into unreal engine 4 and try to build the lights it comes up with an error. I have provided images of the problems and my work.

What are the steps to exporting the sofa so that it will look clean and have no problems when baking.

Thanks in advance,

3DS SOFA -

You will somehow have to generate/create a 2nd uv channel + lightmap, because I did it with your model in blender and I get a pretty good result. Here is the file:

Btw, I would recommend you to decrease the tri count a little bit, because the count amt is pretty high :wink:

Hi ,

As has pointed out you’ll want to create the second UV for lightmaps but there are some other things you’ll want to consider doing as well.

To make things easier and to give you a better starting point for laying out your UV you will need to weld some of the verts together. Using the weld option after highlighting all of the verts for the sofa reduced it down considerably!

This is part of the problem you may have noticed with the UV with your object. There are so many small pieces that are individual polygons not welded together, so when you flat mapped it just looked at them as separate faces. After welding the poly count was cut nearly in half.

You can see that having flat mapped now, there are more larger chunks of UV islands.

You will still want to go back and lay out a better UV with more connected faces to use more texture space for resolution and lighting control.

Also, reducing the poly count for unnecessary edge loops for details that aren’t needed. For example. On the side arms and back and bottom plates you can remove a lot of edges that do not add to the geometry.

I did a test just using the “ProOptimizer” modifier to get poly count down and got it down to around 10k and retaining a lot of detail. You will look smoothing groups doing this and have to reset them up but you can end up with a less poly intensive mesh.

This mesh still need a lot of work but this is the result of what I’ve mentioned above.

Thank you your awesome for doing this!. How long did it take for you to achieve that.

Thank you for the help i will try using your technique for this model and future ones and ill see how i go. Thanks alot !

No problem at all, ! :slight_smile:

If you have any issues feel free to ask! I certainly don’t mind because I can remember what it was like trying to figure a lot of this out on my own. It can certainly be frustrating at times, that is for sure! :smiley: