I waS so new to game dev artwork that it was easy to get carried away enjoying the process and making something to be proud ( and in sculptris itgs easy to get a large mesh given without sufficient detail it can be hard to get a look you’re after) of , then realizing you have no textures,trees or water or anything else yet in the game. Im sure even games that look amazing still have to use normalmaps to fake it to complete the world ( oblivion comes to mind etc, but also offer full world detail for rigs that have the muscle which Ill remain mindful of with mine as that future proofs to a degree).
I actually was mindful about tris when sculpting but never quite enough, so thanks everyone for the apt reminders.
" Also you can export height maps as well (if you dont have cavities in your mesh). " < Im afraid I have several , so no love on that count ;)(
THe closest I got was importing a terrain which is foundation for current mesh,the foundation of level making up 75% where mesh sits on top of terrain and is about 25% ish, so in the long run its all good and going fwd I can look forward to making NormalMaps and adding sufficient extras to fill out a world worth adventuring through which was my goal from the very beginning, but of course reserving higher tri counts the for the big rigs.
OK I hope was ok,I built normal map and lightmap together in same fbx.
Pls see attached screeshot of what new lightmap looks like with much lower verts at 41k.I think it looks much better (yes I reduced best I could in sculptris, what a wonderful tool!).
I am sorry you did not took the advice what I’ve given you in other post you made.
You are doing it wrong, I strongly advice you to read a tutorial about lightmapping like one:
You have 36,046 triangles, assuming you got for worst lightmap resolution lets, say 10pixels per triangle, that means, 360,460 pixels, square root is about 600, next power of 2 is 1024, so your lightmap at 10pixels per triangle must be 1024x1024. BUT at, 10 pixels per triangle in lightmap dont expect any good results, and ANY shadow cast on will look super bad.
Edit: Your UV’s are very difficult also to be lightmap, keeping same uv islands, you will have places where will be zero resulting pixels in lightmap or maybe 1.
I saw your comment,but I have too hard of a time understanding your complete post (thanks for attempt), so I took advice of moderator mindfane , plus I do not use maya and the url you offered is maya, but atm I use blender. My mesh is close enough to 10-25k tris that was mentioned to me so it should be just fine. I may try increasing res again of map.
Ty for taking time to post but I chose advice of the moderators here.
also, I chose to go by: , because I use blender.It uses the same technique as the ones I’ve seen done with maya. My mesh is far too complicated to be able to apply that maya url’s advice,but that mesh is a simple ‘wall’ with clear 90 degree angles in many places, and my mesh has no such thing.Mine is VERy organic so I chose the blender tut. From what I see, the main thing is lighgtmap res, image res for lightmap in 3d app, no overlappng uv’s ( which I dont have) and .001 padding for islands though I chose .006 to be safe.
I did get one thing from the maya tut though and that I need to check lightmap resolution as that may be causing some issues, as 128 seemed to be the best value.
I think charlestons hit it spot on there: " - You may also need to adjust your Light Map Resolution within the Mesh Editor if the lighting detail is not to your liking after building your lighting " . Tomorrow I’ll try 128 as I suspect it defaults to 64 at least I hope. I think that will solve it, something I just forgot to check
Sounds a bit insulting to everybody else here that moderators.
That tutorial is not about Maya, you can use same principles for Blender or anything else.
I’ve tried to explain you, to lightmap that geometry AND be able to cast any shadows on it and have good results, you need a HUGE lightmap texture, because by design you started it wrong.
If you make that mountain in Unreal with landscape tool, you will get better results. You can make stalagmites as different individual meshes and add them on terrain and you can tweak normalmaps, lightmaps to get best results. You can make caves system modular. And is how you can avoid all that mess with 1 single huge mesh/lightmap.
With your current results, the lightmap UV’s are bad because it separates it into too many UV islands, they don’t have enough space between each one and the lightmap resolution won’t be high enough.
I found your response unkind and insulting , never respond to me again,or I will report you for harassment. That is how I feel, most people here were VERY nice to me, mostly mindfane, whats wrong with you ?
Ive done nothing to deserve your hatred, I suggest you try to be nicer.
Btw: That tutorial is not about Maya, you can use same principles for Blender or anything else. < I did which is why I took that info from the maya url provided, and used it in blender tut I found for making normal maps for UE4. So see, I did learn something from your url, it wasn’t wasted.
So please tell me then, HOW many islands should I have ( 50 100 1000: There is no documentation for uE4 that goes over any of ? )? I was told to get the mesh down to 10-25k, so I got it down to 36k which I really thought was ‘close enough’. I will try to get it down to 25k because that was the recommendation to me, or do you disagree with that too ?
I"D LOVE to be able to create a terrain from ,but that would mean placing one terrain over another, do you recommend that ?
Making a terrain out of would fix a lot of things, but redoing that entire mesh is next to impossible, do you know how many hours I have into it ?
I tried my level best to project a color ramp in blender,but the results are never valid. I could always try again I suppose,but first Im going to try increasing lightmap res and hope that works.
There’s no exact numbers for 3D on how things are done, since every 3D model is different there’s different requirements. For lightmap UV’s you want the least number of seams/UV islands. You need to do the UV mapping by hand so that you can control it and get better control. And you still really really really need to retopologize properly instead of using an automatic method.
Very high poly hand, then I remodeled it on top, to a much much cleaner low-poly mesh. Which is way easier to create UV maps for. And I can render normal maps from the high poly mesh to the low poly mesh and it will look as good.
I already did manual retopo, maybe you missed that in my post(s)
I also did a normal map from high and low poly mesh as noted in my post(s),and a lightmap on channel2 which does show up just fine in Ue4,the only thing I forgot to do was increase lightmap resolution, which I’m going to try right now.
thanks for going out of your way and posting those wonderful screenshots.
I had not applied a material yet which wasn’t helping so applying one did help a lot actually so I need to work on that more.
Oddly enough, or common (?), the mesh when viewed from static mesh editor, looks perfect light and all why is that ?
Would if help if I increased res of uv image in blender?
I guess I can try once more to export to a terrain using a projected color ramp but Ive not had much luck doing that, and if I try to create it inside ue4 as a terrain I think Ill spend a lot of time to duplicate it and not get very far but I may have to consider it, we’ll see.
Is changing to ue4 4.5 going to magically fix lighting ?
OK, I got the splitting up to work, but Im not entirely sure if I need to lightmap each individual piece , or just split into the 5 or 6 pieces , select all and lightmap all of it together ?
EDIT: Ok, I assigned a lightmap each ( blender 2.72) but on trying to select all to export, 4 pieces are a ‘red’ color’ and only one is ‘orange’ which is the obj select color blender uses to show a object is selected in object mode, which is what im trying to do is select them all for export. Is a bug or have I missed some important step?
EDIT2: I got all lightmaps in but 1, which instead of being a uvmapping that shows up fine in blender its just a large triangular looking mesh. I reimported into ue4 but its not updating, please see here:
EDIT 3: I fixed it, I think I was just overwriting files in error. All 5 show up fine using ‘uv’ button in static editor. With luck the lighting will build better now , I"ll update changes.
