strange foliage lighting

JoshWilkinson

What's causing these results? Some of my problem is the foliage normals in maya, but most importantly I want to know why my meshes are so effed in UDK. Unfortunately I'm desperate at this point.



EDIT: I'm realizing now that this can be unclear. In the first part is the mesh used for the foliage; two iterations with different normals, but both yield poor UDK results.

King Mango

UDK is notoriously difficult for foliage. Have you made sure to have explicit normals checked while importing?
Also there are some settings in the material and the mesh that need to be checked. They're mentioned at UDN.
In the material used with landscape
And in the mesh Used for instancing.
What I always do as well is turn off shadowcast in the mesh properties as well. There might be more because I haven't done anything for several weeks but try looking at every flag that might be relevant and test results.

[EDIT]Also be sure that your mesh has a dedicated uv channel for lightmaps and the size could be a source of trouble too. Too big and the lightmaps won't fit onto the cluster light map. Can't remember the technical term for it sorry.

robert.briscoe

If you are placing these with the foliage paint tool, then that could be the problem. For the past 3-4 UDK builds lighting on foliage props has been buggered when placing them with this tool. I previously had to go back to the May 2012 build in order to fix this, however I've just checked the latest build of UDK and they finally seem to have fixed it.

Otherwise, as King Mango suggests, make sure you're importing to UDK with 'explicit normals' checked in the import options.

JoshWilkinson

Really appreciate the help, guys. I tried adjusting the suggested settings, Mango, but it yielded similar results. However, I should warn that I just came across most of your mentioned settings for the first time so I may not have ticked and unticked everything correctly.

And thanks for the insight into foliage painting, robert. I didn't realize some iterations of UDK can give me different results in that department but it's good to know. This latest image was created using mesh instancing instead of foliage paint. I'm starting to get light on my model with a 32 lightmap resolution, but that seems way too dense for such a small mesh. I see that I can most likely get away with putting everything in the emissive and tweaking with the colors, but I worry about all the back and fourth I'd have to do for that trial and error process, and I worry that I'm not really learning a solution as much as a workaround.