It looks worse after lighting is added. What is going on?
Make sure you actually have a light in there, and also make sure your lightmaps are setup properly: Unwrapping UVs for Lightmaps | Unreal Engine Documentation
looks like noramals are messed up to try to invert green channel
I made another uv for the lightmap in 3dsmax. Then rebuilt lighting in UE4. The object turned black. I then add a bunch of lights. Still black.
Then I tryed 3 different video tutorials that have 3 different ways to do it and none of them worked. For what ever reason its not working for me.
Make sure your object is Static, as lighting will not be built for it otherwise. Also, make sure you have a Lightmass Importance Volume surrounding the area.
If you have a Moveable object, and your lights are all Static, the object is lit from the Volume Lighting Cache. Sometimes, if you don’t have a big enough floor space, Lightmass doesn’t generate a sample in an area, causing an object to be black. Try setting Volume Light Sample Placement Scale in World Settings to 0.5 or smaller. Show>Visualize>Volume Lighting Samples shows the generated samples.
Alternatively, open the mesh in the UE4 static mesh editor, check ‘Generate Lightmap UVs’, and click Reimport. That will auto-generate UVs so you can see if it is an issue with your UVs.
If all else fails, create a new project. That should fix it if it is something with the editor.