I swear I’ve come across this issue before, but I can’t remember what the cause was or how to fix it. Basically, ugly hard-edged blocks are appearing all over my skeletal mesh, like so:
It’s not a texture / normal map issue
as the hard edges are visible even
before applying a material
It’s not caused by poor UV mapping,
as it is occurring inside cleanly
mapped areas
There isn’t some sort of rogue UV set
hidden in the file
There is no funky geometry hidden in
the mesh
Normals are all facing the same
direction, everything looks good with
backface culling turned on in Maya
Tried unlocking the normals in Maya
and softening the edges again
Tried multiple versions of the FBX
exporter
The issue is only present in Unreal -
the edges look fine upon reimporting
the FBX into Maya
The issue does not occur when
importing the file as a static mesh
instead of skeletal mesh
Resetting the weight painting to the
default weights does not fix the
issue
All those things considered, I can only assume it has something to do with it being a skeletal mesh. I’ve ruled out all the normal suspects in terms of normals and UVs, so I’m not really sure what is causing this. Has anyone else ever experienced this before?
Just one other thing to check - have you tested deleting history/non deformer history in Maya before doing the export?
I have also seen this issue before but can’t recall what the resolution was.
Ahh good suggestion, that definitely seems like another likely culprit. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case this time. Tried it and no such luck.
Posting a sample FBX, and giving specifics of which engine version you are using and if it is a launcher or source code build might also help with replicating and diagnosing the cause if you can.
Aha! I solved the problem! Seems the issue was being caused by the Triangulate function in Maya’s FBX exporter. I tried an export with that option checked off and the nasty blocks all disappeared. (Funny, I always thought Unreal required models to be triangulated first, but I guess they work without it).
I seem to be learning that the less functions I have checked in the FBX exporter, the better the process goes. (Baking animations through the exporter was giving me troubles earlier). Still… it’s odd that I could only see the issue in Unreal and not when testing the FBX files in Maya. Anywho, this is solved as far as I’m concerned.
