I’ve imported it to unreal, set up a subsurface two-sided material, set up lightmaps, tried to bake the light to see if everything is alright… and it’s not. It’s not alright at all.
What could be the issue? I remember making opened notebook similar to this in the past, and it worked fine.
I even went back and opened an old project of mine to see how I set it up there. Everything seems to be exactly the same as I did now, but there it works fine.:
I tried both one-sided geometry with two-sided subsurface material, and adding thickness with standard material.
The problem with thickness is that those are paper pages… so I can’t really make them thick enough to make the difference.
I guess I’ll just have to compromise, get rid off separate pages altogether and make the whole thing one monolithic “brick” instead >_>
After some extensive testing, tweaking geometry, lightmaps, and just experimenting with stuff to figure out how to correct this issue, here’s what I discovered.
Unreal doesn’t like it at all. Baked light for it gets all sorts of screwed.
However, if I split it into two pieces - the cover, and the block of pages, it fixes the lighting issue.
The problem is - now I have one more draw call for a small prop. Which is not ideal.
I tried to combine two pieces in maya, without merging vertices, but that only led to the same result as before, with one whole mesh.
I tried to combine two pieces in unreal with Merge Actor Tool, and, weirdly enough, that gives different results. There’s no more shadow bleeding, but there’s no occlusion either.