Spec/SpecPwr Surface Discontinuity...damnit!

punchface

Okay, so I've been beating my head against the wall on this one for a couple of days now and I guess I'm going to have to surrender to needing help. Here are the pics first so y'all can see the obvious issue I'm having:

punchface

So the issue is primarily on the top of the barrel of the non-revolver looking weapon where the light appears to be coming in from different angles entirely split along the UV seam.

I've been reading a lot of here on polycount about explicit normals and tangents/bi-normal settings in the .fbx export plug in for Max. I've also seen some stuff that people have been talking about wherein the problem may or may not originate with inverted or overlapped UV shells or clusters...

I know for sure that my stuff isn't overlapped in this particular case.

Furthermore, one of the things that I tried when I realized that the problem might be coming from weirdness in how UDK deals with .fbxs, I just tried to skip the issue entirely by importing the weapon as an .ASE.

No luck. No joy. Please help.

pf

Xendance

Are you using a dominant light? Non dominant lights bake specular reflections, whereas with dominant lights the direct lighting is dynamic. For a weapon model, I think a dynamic light would work better. Just convert that to a mover or some other that relies on dynamic lighting

sprunghunt

my suggestion is to just not put a UV seam in such an obvious spot.

Froyok

Check that your UVs with the specular error are also rotated correctly (head on top, not shifted by 90°).

punchface

Xendance,

I'll try it out and shift back to a dominant directional light. I got rid of mine in favor of point lights because I understood how to control shadow sharpness better.

sprunghunt

Maybe next time, sure. But for this time, your suggestion doesn't help me understand what is actually happening here. It might be that putting a seam there is a bad idea but that's a separate issue.

Froyok,

If you're right, about this and UDK is going to be that damn picky about UV cluster orientation, I might just switch over to the Cry Engine for stuff because that sucks. That's lame and dumb and weak. Ugh...gosh, I hope you're wrong. I sooooo don't want to redo all my textures because I need to change the orientation of the friggin' clusters.

Thanks for the feedback y'all.

pf

punchface

So here we are now. Xendance's bit about the DD light worked, bless your soul, sir/madam!

But yeahhhh, there's still this super annoying super-super sharp shadow edges and artifacts all over the place which make everything look totally poopy:

JonathanLambert

Post a screen shot with a flat grey vector3 diffuse applied and post a screen shot of your shader.

Xendance

Or just put the viewport in lighting and/or detail lighting mode.

punchface

Just a vector3 in diffuse with nothing else? What about normals or spec or reflection blah blah?

Xendance

Just turn on this viewmode, then it's lighting only with normals enabled, that way it's easier to spot if the normals are ok on your mesh. For checking out the specular do what JonathanLambert said

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ViewModes.html#Detail Lighting

punchface

As I figured they would, my normals look fine:

punchface

(bump) Has anybody seen those weird shadows before? Anyone? Bueller?

pf

punchface

So it's been quite a while since I hit this thread...here's how things played out:

I got a new larger hard drive.
I upgraded to Win8 64
I installed a new GFX card capable of supporting DX11.
I got the 02.2013 version of the UDK.

After all this, my problems are basically solved. In any case though, I was never able to figure out what was causing those weird shadows. Here are the final pics - Three cheers for modern technology:

Quack!

Your normals were inverted in your previous screens. Something you have done since then fixed that. A new import of the textures in the new version of UDK with the proper import settings most likely fixed that.