So my question is, what the hell is making the shadows so unnatural. I am very disappointed. I put hours in creating these assets and hours in search for finding a solution.
Problems: Shadows, seen on walls, are to “soft”, on the floor you literally see the different tiles because the lighting seems to render for one mesh lighter or darker in the whole part, if near or far to the lightsource.
Also Lamp shaddows are bad…
In Blender, I used this 256*256 Texture for all meshs:
I found out, that if i push the Static Mesh Ligh Map Resolution up, it gets a little bit better, but for massively increasing Lighting-Build-times. UE4 uses a resolution of 4 for my meshes (very low?!?). I overwritten it with 128 and 256. Going over 256 will increase rendertime massively.
Could the small uv-size be a source of this light(map?) problem:
Not sure what the issue is here but when you mentioned scale, something sparked. Perhaps try changing the scene scale in blender to 0.01 and exporting out your FBX files again. This will make sure the assets match unreal scale (which is in centimetres compared to a blender unit being 1 metre by default).
Why? Because1x1 pixel uv-map, is basically giving a solid color to the objects face.
I understand you want to program this in UE4 in a quick way. But bad input gives bad output.
Try to deliver a clean, well configured .blend file.
Hi @FedPete,
thanks for your reply but I think I did not fully understand your answer here.
I used this Palette-technique learned by Imphenzia (Learn Low Poly Modeling in Blender 2.9 / 2.8 - YouTube). He scales the UVs to 0, this defintitly does not work with UE (result in black Materials). So i scaled up a bit. I learned, that Imphenzia is using Unity, where this does work.
I am using correct world dimensions. A 1x1 cube in UE4 (Basic Actors) = A 1x1 Cube *.fbx from my blender config.
All my normals are correct.
What are UV-maps in a good optiumum format for you? What are you using?
Blender default cube is 2x2x2 Blender units in the past but in the latest version 2m x 2m x 2m. Blender uses metrics, default 1 meter.
Blender objects and their internal mesh can differ in scale! That is why you need to apply scale for Blender.
A UV-Map is the conversion of a 3D object onto a flat 2D surface (bitmap).
The size of the UV-Mesh AND the size of the projected 2D bitmap, determines the size and dimension displayed (projected) on the 3D object.
A single FACE of a UV map, represents a single face on the rendered 3D object.
If a UV map face has the size of 1 pixel, that pixel is used (stretched, resized), to fill its related face object.
Game designers strive to configure the UV-mesh in such a way, that it uses the total capacity of the textured bitmap. In your case, if I see it correctly, I see 1% of the bitmap used by you UV-mesh.
I’ve no clue about this way of working. But then, I’m also not into game-related Blender development. So i know nothing about this trick. But I can imagine it will color UE4 objects in the same color. But Why using a color image and uv-mapping. Isn’t there a function in UE4 to give an object a basic color?
This is the Blender community, but I don’t know if many people do know about UE4.
Glad you found a solution to this. I did forget to mention that it also requires scaling things up again by 100, but anyway, in retrospect, I doubt it would have solved your issue.
Your solution is something I may perhaps need in the future with my game assets if I experience similar problems. Well done!
. Here is the ultimate answer for all with the same problem:
