I had to fix the texture in blender and re-import it as some of the normals where the wrong way around which made the mesh appear as if it had holes in it. I solved that issue, but now can’t figure out why the material for this bikini is bright in the shadow and dark in the light. I have posted examples of it here - [UE - Light reflection inverse what it should be on material - Album on Imgur](4 images showing the issue)
The 4th image linked shows it best; where you can see the shadow on the ground created by the sun light, but the material is reflecting like it is in a shadow. while when it is in the shadow you can see the material better as if it has a light on it. i.e. it’s inverted behaviour.
I have tried every setting but nothing seems to work to flip the effect of the light on the material or asset. Any suggestion would help.
I just fixed it by accident. Turns out the skeleton mesh was missing a Light Map UV Channel - I must have unchecked the auto create feature when importing the fbx - and I had to make another one in Unreal in the UV Editor (the static mesh editor does not work for skeletal meshes, so I could not follow the fixes I was finding online). Once I did that, it showed lit up correctly.
It had only one UV channel (0) which is for the texture, but none for the light map. Creating one was enough to make it work.
If you have this problem there is literally NO info out there on this that works for skeletal meshes, only static meshes. So do this:
In UE5.2 right click the skeletal mesh, select UV Editor, check the “Channels” drop down and make sure there are at least two channels (Texture and light map) if you have only one channel, click on the Channels button, add and apply a UV Channel and that is it. It worked for me. you’re welcome.
Glad you solved it but honestly I can’t think of a reason why this solution would work; Skeletal meshes don’t bake lightmaps so there isn’t any reason to give them a lightmap UV channel.