Garbeled UV coordinates in UT3 package

crazyfingers

Been doing lots of .ase reimporting into a package to give all my assets lighting UV coordinates when things started going bonkers. Mapping coordinates are being flipped around or become "stuck" on a very old version and cannot be imported over.

Has anyone experienced this before? Reimporting objects with the correct uv layouts doesn't fix the old ones, yet if I make a new package everything works perfectly but i'd have to put everything back into my scene again from scratch.

This is driving me crazy, do i simply need to make more packages rather than just having one, does UT3 have an asset limit per package? is it corrupt? if anyone has experienced this before your input would be greatly appreciated!

P.S. Oh, and new assets are rendering light bakes as pure black to boot. Older assets are doing fine, just the new ones aren't recieving lighting, mapping to channel 0 works, so vertex lighting is fine.

Ben Apuna

Sounds like the updating lightmap UVs problem. After reimporting the updated ase you need to open up the static mesh editor and reset it's the LightMapCoordinateIndex back to 0, then back to 1 (or whatever channels you are using for lightmaps), then rebake the lighting.

That should do it, hope that helps.

crazyfingers

Yeah, that bug always annoyed me ben and thanks for the reply, but that wasn't the issue.

I've finally kinda figured out how to make a little progress. By exporting my asset as an OBJ with no mapping coordinates, reimporting it and then redoing the UV's i can at least get a fresh start. But it just seems odd that everything works fine in max prior to that, yet when i export into UT3 it just stays fubar. In the preview for hte generic browser no matter what i do to mapping coordinate 1, the diffuse stays the same on the preview asset, it should change.

For whatever reason something is lost in translation between max and UT3, and it's driving me insane and sapping all artistic progress. Wish i could just forget about this and push forward in the project, but i'm afraid it's going to happen again as i have no idea why it's happening. At least it's only lighting coordinates and not totally necessary, but they certainly help punch up a project.

Autocon

Hey Jeff I get this problem all the time also. Never was able to figure out why or how to fix it but I found a good work around that is close to what you do.

If the model is all messed up then the first thing I do is go into the UV editor. Save the original UV Unwrap. Go to the second UV Unwrap for the lightmap and save that one too. Export as an OBJ. Open it and then Load both old Unwraps back.

Works every time so far at least.

crazyfingers

Thanks for the reply Auto, I think I finally got it workin'. Didn't work right off the bat in max, but it got me thinkin'. So what i did was export the object with no UV's, imported it into UT3, then reloaded it in UT3 with the new UV's, seemed to nuke the old ones that were causing all the grief. So basically the same thing, just done in UT3 rather than max. Whew, I'm glad that's over with. I'm not even going to hassle with lighting maps for now till the scene has really started coming together.

Again, thanks for the advice Anthony, saved a shit-ton of headache on my part. Heard you got a good clutch art test going on, GOOD LUCK!

Autocon

ha yeah, thanks

found the same UT3 thing you found. seemed to take me a bit longer to do it that way so I stayed with the max approch.


one thing though from talking with a few different artists who use UT3 on a daily basis they told me to really only worry about light maps on walls and floors as these are the things that will be catching most of the important shadows. everything else is pretty good with vertex lighting.

gamedev

Just wanted to say this is a pretty common UT3 import error. Basically, UT3 doesn't think you're mesh has changed and will not update the new asset properly. If you import the same updated mesh w/ a new name, you should see that your correct UV's were imported. There are lots of work around for it, but as you've noticed, its a pain.

crazyfingers

Ahhh, i should have thought of trying that, gamedev, that will definitely save time in the future. I exported over the same .ase and then renamed it in UT3 to create a new asset, didn't think to rename the .ASE name on export.

You raise a good point Anthony, that vertex lighting is fine 90% of the time and in all actuality would have worked on the asset i was having the issue on, it was just one of those things i HAD to figure out, glad you guys could help out

Jeff Parrott

The easiest way I've found to update the lightmap UV set in UE3 is to reimport the new model with the new UVs over the old one and in the Mesh Editor cycle the UV set number between 0 and 1 or whatever your UVs are. That seems to fix it every time.