Not sure if I’m doing this right, but I downloaded a character model and it came with textures. Here is how I put it together after I imported it into UE 4.9.
Each material came with 3 textures. Name_A Name_D and Name_N figured that meant, Normal, Diffuse, and not sure what the _A is.
Any help on how to make the below image look better is greatly appreciated.
“A” could stand for “Ambient Occlusion.” It looks like it could be an AO mask, assuming that’s what you hooked up to the specular input. Try plugging it into the Ambient Occlusion input instead.
Things like specularity, roughness and metallic attributes work on a 0-1 scale, so that 4 probably isn’t doing anything. As for the naming conventions, the A stands for Albedo, the N stands for normal and the other stands for Diffuse.
I think A stand Anistrophy in this particular case.
So exactly where should I plug the A in? or just remove it completely? It seems to make the hair worse no matter where I plug it in at, so I’m guessing it’s the way the hair.jpg was created, because no matter what part of the hair always looks fake.
Is this a Fuse/Mixamo model? If so, they have a full tutorial on how to work with their materials. IIRC, the hair material needs to be set to translucent or masked.
I have no idea where this model originally came from. I found it on TF3DM for free, the desc says it is, Talia from VG Batman: Arkham origins and came from Cinema 4D. So I’m guessing someone either modeled it after her or ripped it from the game. I just download free models off that site to mess around with them in UE.
When I imported the .fbx file it came with textures and I had to build materials from the textures and every texture came in 3. the A, D and N version. Every other material looks good as you can see her top looks good, her skin and face looks good, just the hair is the only one messed up like that.
As I am very new to UE, only been using it about 2 weeks plus I picked up Maya 2016 so I been rotating on learning each of them every other day.
Okay, try plugging up either the Name_A or Name_D to the base color of the hair material and then set the rendering mode to masked.
Also, for the eyelash material, plug up the main texture to base color while plugging the alpha pin of said texture into opacity, then set the rendering mode to translucent so it will look right. Make sure to check two sided for each of those materials.
Not really sure how to set rendering mode to translucent as you mentioned, as I didn’t see any rendering options on the materials. I saw two sided tho.
Got it, none of that seems to help, so I’m just gonna go ahead and say that the hair texture is messed up from whoever threw it up on the site for download.
Can you post the the model/material here? Like upload for some of us to mess with so we can help.
Poking around in it myself, and it’s an Opacity Mask. Set your Blend Mode to Masked, and plug the _A file into the Opacity Mask output:
FINALLY! The mystery solved. Thanks a lot for the help. What you do? just play around until you stumbled upon what looked right? Guess that’s kinda what you get when dealing with other peoples work, trying to guess what goes where.
Now to learn animation so I can animate her using the default mannequin and my learning experience will be awesome so far.
EDIT: It seems she has no bones except for Talia Posed, is there any way to give her the bones from the default mannequin? OR Would I have to open her up in Maya and give her bones?
Yeah, just playing around with it and trying out a few things.
Turns out the Masked blend mode & plugging the _A file into Opacity Mask is good for the Body texture on that model, but for the Hair it looks better using Translucent blend mode with the _A file in Opacity:
Yea that looks a lot better. Really appreciate the help, learning so much every day on here.
If anyone is able to animate her without throwing her in Maya, letting me know how you did it would be greatly appreciated.
I’d be careful about using that model for any kind of actual production, it looks like the character was ripped from Batman Arkham Origins based on the link from where you got it.
