A couple UDK questions

Pyxis

Hi everyone,

I'm building a level in UDK for my semester project, and I have a couple of questions/issues I was hoping you guys could shed some light on.

1) Can you duplicate landscape safely? I have a level built which I'd like to partially mirror. I have flipped it by selecting the existing landscape and using ctrl-click to duplicate it with no problems yet, but I just want to be sure before I continue that I'm not going to run into any issues down the line.

2) I have a problem with a couple of my meshes displaying with weird shading. Google has told me that this is probably a lightmap problem, but I have added lightmaps to the affected meshes and done all of the recommended fixes and they're still displaying badly. The mesh is clean in Maya (and looks fine in Marmoset), and softening/hardening normals does nothing but swap the bad shading around, not fix it.



The mesh displays best with hardened normals, but as you can see, it's not at all perfect.

blankslatejoe

1: You can duplicate landscapes and terrain safely, but those things do eat up lots of memory. I'm not sure if you can safely mirror it by using the normal (drawscale=-1 or Rightclick>transform>flipX/Y/Z) methods). I'd bet not.

2: not sure what youre asking here. If your mesh has all hard edges then that's what's causing the faceted look....post a shot from marmoset or maya and then a shot of it looking bad in UDK so we can see a bit more of what you intend.

Pyxis

Hm, okay. I don't want to risk screwing up my map, so I'll have to look into that more.

As for the mesh, please let me rephrase, I didn't explain myself well. The issue is that I want it to look nice and smooth, but when I smooth the normals, the shading goes wonky, as you can see in the pic below.





And this is the mesh in Maya.

Edit: I've noticed that the only things having shading issues were based off of cylinders. Does UDK pitch a fit over cylinders or something?

Angry Beaver

The problem is more HOW you're smoothing it. Lighting when on smoothed faces is smoothed between vertices so where you put your vertices cab have quite an effect if one vertex is completely black that black will get smoothed across the rest of the face producing the glitches you're showing. you eithier need to
* add new vertecies (control loops)
* isolate your smoothing (some hard egdes some soft edges
* use a lightmap instead
* use a fill light to reduce how dark your dark lit parts are
I'd personally recommend option 1 or 2. There's lots of resources on both if you do some searching.