Lemme preface this by saying that I’m extremely new to unreal. When I imported a character from maya, his shading became strange an ripply. I can’t remember what this is technically called, but I think it has to do with how sharply the lighting reads the edges of the geometry. Regardless, how do I fix? (Image for reference)
It has to do with vertex normals / smoothing groups / hard edges. Those 3 terms are kinda the same name for the same thing. Each vertex has at least one vertex normal that determines what direction it is facing and how it will recieve light. It looks like your mesh has one smoothing group / no hard edges / averaged vertex normals. You’ll want to use hard edges / smoothing groups / editing vertex normals to adjust the shading, or back a normal map from a high poly model. Here’s an example I quickly found online of a basic mesh that’s similar to yours in that it’s one smoothing group, and what it looks like with mulitple smoothing groups / hard edges / split vertex normals.
There’s a lot of over lapping terms with this topic. 3ds Max calls them smoothing groups, hard edges is a pretty universal term, and vertex normals is ultimately what you are controlling through hard edges and smoothing groups.
SUCCESS! Thanks a ton for the help. Went back and made Maya export the smoothing groups with the Fbx, and everything looks good. You’ve made Chester a happy little chest.