I’ve brought in a skeletal mesh originally made in Maya, and I constructed a control rig that stretches the character’s limbs. However, the stretched part is partly covered by a black shade that isn’t affected by changes to any material. It is present even without any material.
It IS affected by lighting (moving the sun), but it seems to have a reversed effect where it’s dark when contacting the light.
My belief is that it is due to bad geometry, normals, or something going wrong in the transfer from Maya to Unreal (5.3.2). However, I’m not sure what the specific solution is or which program it should be done in. Reversing normals didn’t work.
Change the material - in the property options. That’s where recompile option is at.
Or in the options of the mesh - depending on what it is.
Also make sure your material instance and material is set up for use with whatever it’s used for (clothing, requires you check a specific use box for instance).
If you really think normals are at fault, simply output a normals view and compare the stretched/non stretched version.
What I actually think is going on is that you have some bad lighting setup to where the light is baked or hybrid and the stretched item invalidates the computed lighting.
-This is what I found within the Skeletal Mesh, LOD. Not sure if I got the right menu or not, but I tried changing everything here. No luck. The material is also supposed to act as a simple color. No Volume, Post Process, Clothing, or anything specific. Just color.
“Output a normals view and compare the stretched/non stretched version.”
-I opened what I believe to be the normals view (World Normal from Buffer Visualization). There is something I failed to mention: the bind pose for the limbs is really scrunched, so much that the geometry clips into itself - as a bind pose.
I posted the stretch pose as well as an inside view of the bind pose, where there seems to be no clear color difference in the inside geo for the bind. Only the stretch is different. There’s also the bind pose in Maya, clearly demonstrating the geometry overlapping with itself. The reason it is like this is because these limbs are supposed to be the axels of a car, and so the bind pose needs the wheels to be really close to the body. Perhaps Unreal takes issue with that?
“Bad lighting setup where the stretched item invalidates the computed lighting.”
That would be interesting, but I haven’t touched the lighting in my scene beyond moving the sun’s location. It’s largely default. I also find it curious that I don’t see this issue with any other object in my scene. It think it is the geometry.
The issue was the bind pose. Unreal didn’t like that the bind pose had geometry that folded in on itself. So I went back into maya, created a new bind pose with clean topology, and exported again. The black is gone.
