Put simply I’ve got a skeletal mesh of a decent amount of polygons - more than enough to drive the character’s shape and deformations without trouble. But my character suffers from lighting artifacts as if it were lit by a toon shader. Sudden hard shadows, mainly. That and some faceting - clearly polygonal lighting as it were. Looking into this I found two leading solutions:
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Increase UE4’s lighting fidelity and tweak shadow settings.
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Use mesh smoothing
I’m well aware of the former but am interested in the latter as it seems to be solving the problem at the foundation. I can make a high resolution version of my mesh and bake the normal maps (and I plan to) but as this is my first character I’m prototyping a lot of stuff - I’m seeing how deformations go (geometry, lighting, textures), sillouhettes, ect. and I need a “fast” solution for quick visualization.
In Modo I see two options for FBX export. Triangulate and Export Smoothing Groups. Everything is telling me that Triangulate is the way to go. It’s the UE4 preset even.
I understand what I want to be as follows: By default lighting is based on the polygon. But by using this magical smoothing the lighting is actually made to be an average of the 4 verts making up the polygon (or 3 for the tris actually). Not only that, but more specifically if all 3 verts making up the triangle have a separate value you get a smooth falloff between them… kind of like a linear interpolation? So it REALLY helps to hide the faceting. My Google-ese may be off but I haven’t been able to figure out how to do this without just baking over a high poly model. And to be honest I’m not 100% sure if that’ll do what I’m hoping it will as subdividing tends to alter the mesh geometry pretty heavily without adding extra loops and whanot. Which isn’t the problem so much as just wanting to be fast for prototype iteration is the problem.
For reference: Shader Fundamentals - Normal Mapping - YouTube
Thanks!