Please bestow wisdom upon me:
When I drag a material to my imported mesh, the material looks great.
When I bake lighting, the object turns black.
I know the right way to do this is to have good UV maps, but if I lack that skill, can I package a game without having that knowledge, and just using dynamic lighting?
I am only making a simple experience for one person locally, and performance is not much of a an issue. 1080Ti rendering on a 1080p monitor.
Please help.
GLmk2
Why don’t you just set your lights to movable and give it a shot? There are a lot of games that use only dynamic lighting.
Many 3D modelling programs have automatic UV generation features that work just fine for lighting.
Hey thanks very much for the feedback!
@HulpeSergiu I’ve tried your suggestion and it seems to be working pretty well!
@MH I have access to a number of decent educations licenses (Max / Maya). It was my understanding UV generation needed decent topography, and hence retopologizing. Does that sound right? I’m using remeshed scan data rather than cleanly modeled work, so not sure if those tools will work.
Forgive my ignorance:
Right now I’m bringing fairly high poly models into my environment (500 000k).
If anyone has a suggestion on what I should be researching in terms of saving higher quality detail into lower poly models when the topology isn’t created by me I’d appreciate it.
Topology doesn’t really matter that much for UVs. Though the more convoluted your surfaces are the more effort it might take to make it look good. The important factor is deciding where to make cuts in the UV mesh. Choose edges where you don’t mind having a seam, and cut them so that the UV unwrap function can open up your model into a mostly flat shape automatically. Kind of like making a papercraft model in reverse. It doesn’t have to be perfect because the auto unwrap function can use a bit of distortion to flatten the details.
If your model is purely convex, you might also be able to get away with just using a sphere projection, which is totally automatic, though wastes texture space and makes the detail level uneven.
Hey thanks OwenWP
take a look at this mesh. Is this kind of thing you think I might have luck with? Would this fit with what you’re saying?
You can just use movable lights and it won’t need lightmap UV’s, it just won’t look as good and the realtime performance won’t be as good.
hey thanks @darthviper107
I’ve decent luck with movable lights, but the only catch is I’m I’m doing this art gallery experience requiring spotlights on every object. Probably 10-20 in the gallery.
I’m also working in VR and think I’ve noticed the performance hit (although I’m not sure).
If I *can *find a way to bake lights / ambient occlusion etc into these files it would be great, but otherwise I’ll do as you say and stick to movable lights.
Any tips regarding the maximum number of lights appreciated. (on a 1080 Ti with a single viewer in VR).
Any mesh can be unwrapped, because all meshes are made up of 2D surfaces. Obvious things would be making cuts on natural borders of the mesh, like around the goggles and under the mane, or between its folds. However you would unwrap it to make a flat surface if it were a physical object made of a thin material. Or if it were a real lion and you were trying to skin it.
You could also use just Volumetric Lightmaps. Currently they require static lighting to be enabled and some sort of Lightmap UV on each mesh. The end result is baked to spherical harmonics, so it includes some directionality, isn’t limited by lightmaps, and includes occlusion and color bounce, but you will have to use a pretty high density for interiors and since you need static lighting enabled you lose out on some of the benefits of having it disabled in an otherwise dynamic lighting scenario.
You can make a simple blueprint that switches your lights from static to dynamic before/after you bake too, to speed up the process.
Edit: Also forgot to add, you’re going to be paying way more than usual for your dynamic shadows if all of your meshes are 500k tris. That’s a very expensive shadow mesh.
Hey thanks @OwenWP
Good suggestions on parting lines. Appreciate it.
@rosegoldslugs I really appreciate that suggestion. It’s a little beyond my skill level, but it’s helpful to have that guidance to start researching.
Back to the books for me!