Hello! My intention is to be proven wrong in this thread.
So far, it is my understanding that It is currently impossible to import a skeletal mesh from a usd file and to preserve the authored normals inside of it.
In order to prove me wrong, I would appreciate if you would modify the given example files such that they do import properly. Screenshots of other assets, providing unrelated files that do import properly, and etcetera are not as effective of a refutation, although I am just some guy so what can I even do about it.
In these files I have an extremely simple cube that is rigged. I tried three different methods: face-varying normals, vertex normals, and providing vertex normals, bitangents, and tangents. ALL of them import with a soft-edged cube that has averaged normals.
Changing the compute normals flag in the Properties of the skeletal mesh and clicking apply does nothing, even though doing so on a static mesh imported from usd does fix the normals to show the correct authored ones.
The first 3 attachments are the usds as I’ve described them. The first picture attached shows those imported USDs with a default opaque material on them, alongside a white cube from unreal engine’s default shapes. As you can see, all normals are recomputed on the imported usds. Finally, the last image shows how all normal recomputes are turned off, the apply changes is grayed out because the settings are implemented, and the cube still has soft normals. This is the current state of all three cubes in the other example image.
So. Is it possible?
cube_faceVarying_norm.usd (3.7 KB)
cube_vert_norm_binorm_tangent.usd (6.8 KB)
cube_vertex_normals.usd (5.2 KB)
