Why do my models look flat in unreal?

NautalusX

you can visit my website to see the texture flats of each one.


Are my textures lacking in contrast? They seem fine when I look at them. Is it a lighting issue? Materials? I'm not doing anything funky.. I just have it setup with diffuse, spec, normal.. a little spec power boost.. some basic reflection cube map. Theyre lit with dynamic dominant directional lights.. because it looks way better than baked lighting from what I tested.:)

JordanW

Could you be more specific with "flat"? Are you creating lightmaps? I don't see any shadows on the model.

NautalusX

No, I'm not creating lightmaps. Because I notice models look much better when dynamically lit.

The flatness im talking about is hard to explain.. look at the texture on the rusty pipe.. first model.. it just doesnt seem to pop. I'm guessing the only way would be to paint dodge/burn on certain areas to make them pop more. Like on a pipe where you dodge one side brighter up and down to make it appear more 3d (painted lighting) .. which is supposidly bad. because your supposed to let the shadows/highlights change according to light direction in real time.

olivierth

I remember having problem with models looking different and I had to get into the static mesh properties and set it so it gets dynamic lighting...

NautalusX

to further explain what I mean.. see how much more the texture seems to pop out when lit with xoliul shader 2 and marmoset lighting:






marmo:


so yeah I'm convinced its somthing to do with lighting in udk. The udk specularity.. it never seems to act the same quality even if i boost it way up and mess around with the spec maps. I know I shouldn't expect the same but I've seen other peoples models in udk with the same texture depth quality as these other programs to them.

JordanW

Dominant directional lights still bake shadows for static geometry.

What other lights are in your scene? If you have a skylight it will flatten your geoemtry because it is unshadowed ambient light.

If you have environment lighting enabled in world properties lightmass settings and don't bake lighting then it will be previewing the environment light with a skylight.

The pipe you mentioned looks like it pops more because it has a brighter specular value in the xouli shader. If you want it to match you should make your specular more intense in UDK.

Ace-Angel

If you could show the material and entire scene setup, it would be nice, since from the looks of it, you don't have the right lights and/or you Spec is abit weak, which could be easily fixed with a Spec * Constant(2).

But can't say for sure.

ENODMI

try flipping your green channel in your normal map

NautalusX

is anything strange about my mat setup?

its using a cube map with a reflection mask texture to mask off areas that arnt reflective.

Ace-Angel

-Try Mul your Gloss instead of adding. Also, try a number like 64, 128 or 256.

-Reflection Vector -> Transform (Tangent to World) -> Cubemap

-Also, add your Cube to your Diffuse instead of Lerping it, and control it's strength with a Constant, before Mul the entire thing Cube setup bu your mask

-You can also put up your Reflection in your Specular if you want the lighted sided to be stronger for the reflection.

-Is your normal map compressed correctly? As in did you check to see if you selected the correct importation setting, if not, open it, and disable SRGB.

-Use Moveable/Toggleable lights, just make sure you restart UDK after long sessions since lights might stop working after a long session.

NautalusX

Like so? A little unclear on your reflection setup instructions.

Ace-Angel

Yep, that's gist, sorry for the messy post previously.

So does the model looks OK now? Or does it lack still definition?

NautalusX

it's much better.(: This image was sharpened in photoshop with unsharp mask and it was resized down to 1024 width. I know marmoset has a sharpen post process effect, which is really nice. I couldn't find such a option in udk.


is there any other mat tweaks I could to push it more?
I turned off the global environment lighting too because it was adding to much of a skyish color to the whole thing. And its using the correct dynamic light set up.