My procces of generating the scene is very tedious and mundane task even after using the sketch up and blender s/w which consumes most of my time and effort. Especially generating the correct normals for static meshes is where all this happens, no matter what automation you use ‘make normals consistent’, ‘smart Uv mapping’ and ‘Lightmap Pack’ doesn’t help you in most of the cases, because it requires user interference to correct face normals manually(Blender doesn’t know which face is inside or which is outside, it can be totally arbitrary based on intended usagee, so blender can only use assessment techniques AFAIU)
Based on that, I just wanted to ask the community is there a more efficient way of doing it with less pain and more ease?
Use xnormal to bake your normals. While blender is decent, xnormal is better. You can have unreal generate a lightmaps for you. Blender is great for what it is, a 3d renderer. It’s all open source so until someone decides to tackle the enormous job of scripting a an unreal plugin that auto generates lightmaps for use in unreal your choice is to continue manually adjusting or look into other modelling software. There is no magic button for any software, Maya and Max included to make perfect uvs everytime. I think everyone wishes there was haha. You can search Google for programs that can generate uvs there are some free and paid ones out there. I’ve never used them.
I am using 3d Coat for retology.
Next step is to bake the normals from the high poly model to the low poly model and I do this in allegorithmics substance painter/designer.
Isn’t that normal baking made with xnormal is intended for texture normal mapping? What I mean is normal for faces of geometry. I have the following image, in the first one there are 2 views, left one is how it looks like in the scene editor and right one is how it look like in static mesh editor, chair in the final image is blender rendered image which is actually what I would like to achieve.
I see what you mean. Could you show the unwrap in blender? The chair in the editor looks like the texture is stretching. Can you also show the normal bake? The model itself doesn’t look bad. The geometry looks pretty close. To get a better result I would look into parallax mapping. If you are going to have physical geometry instead of normals giving height, parallax mapping will make it look better and is very easy to setup in material editor.
There is no texture in the model, to allocate the material slots for future usage I use the simple colors. Judging from the 2nd image, I doubt that there is not proper padding around each face as can be seen, mapping of faces are too dense, during importing of FBX model to UE4 If I let the UE4 do the lightmapping for me then all those can be eliminated not best but good to some extent (Interesetingly if I don’t get ticked the Generate UV Lightmapping during fbx import, after loading I couldn’t get Generate Uv Lightmapping from static mesh editor or it doesn’t affect the model). Is there any workaround for that.
Since the lighting and lightmaps can become very sophisticated, the question becomes what software or what methods to do that lightmaps other than default UE4 way. I can understand that there is not a magicall button or software that can do this which yields best results.
Do you triangulate your mesh before export? I know unreal will do it for you, sometimes though it is beneficial to do it in blender before export. I was going to model a chair in blender like yours to see if I could find a path that would help you but then Windows decided to shut off my nvidia. From what I’ve read a few people have had that issue with win.10 haha isn’t life full of surprises.
Do you mean applying subdivison modifier(with triangulation) to model object before exporting to FBX ? Actually I didn’t becuase I was afraid that it superfluously may use memory with unnecessary details, so I didn’t .
Oh no. Don’t do that. Before export you can hit ctrl-t and instead of quad faces it will triangulate them. Doing this in the modeling program instead of letting unreal do it can give you more control over how the vertex data is being transferred. For instance if you think the faces are not lighting or smoothing correctly instead of adjusting the uvs you can select that face and in the tool bar under the N key you can the option to rotate the triangulation clockwise or counterclockwise.
