UE3 material editor questions
hero character
i'm using the roboblitz UE3 edition here and am wondering about a few things.
alphamaps - what would be a nice way to render 8bit alphas mapped to planes for character hair in UE3? nicely lit and able to blend in with the underlying head geometry, shader-wise. all i can come up with is strangely lit things that look like 1 bit alpha cutouts and don't even layer on top of each other correctly. i'm using BLEND_masked as a blend mode and played around with the alpha cutout somewhat. looks shite.
self-shadowing: i get weird shadows in the material editor preview - some of them soft, and once in a while a fully shadowed quad or triangle, where it shouldn't be. what gives, looks like some shadow accuracy setting?
is there a nice way to do color correction on imported textures? i know i can multiply or add but just wondering if there is a better fitting node hiding in the list.
cheers.
alphamaps - what would be a nice way to render 8bit alphas mapped to planes for character hair in UE3? nicely lit and able to blend in with the underlying head geometry, shader-wise. all i can come up with is strangely lit things that look like 1 bit alpha cutouts and don't even layer on top of each other correctly. i'm using BLEND_masked as a blend mode and played around with the alpha cutout somewhat. looks shite.
self-shadowing: i get weird shadows in the material editor preview - some of them soft, and once in a while a fully shadowed quad or triangle, where it shouldn't be. what gives, looks like some shadow accuracy setting?
is there a nice way to do color correction on imported textures? i know i can multiply or add but just wondering if there is a better fitting node hiding in the list.
cheers.
Replies
Self-shadowing- hmm maybe a screenshot would help so we could see whats going on. It could be a few things. 1.) UVS. UE3 doesn't really like overlaying uvs for the shadow maps. 2.) Could just be the preview window. Drop things into a map quickly and build all. Stuff shouldn't be hard lit now.
Color correction. Hmmm I think there was but I can't remember the set up. Let me play with the editor a bit and get back to you on that.
If you give the character a quick rig and import the character as an ACTORX object into the animation preview window you will get all the soft shadow loveliness you desire. Or as Jesse says you could drop the mesh into a quick test map if the object isnt a character or rigged.
If you're going to be doing color correction on a lot of textures I'd suggest using the post process editor and doing some tone mapping on the whole scene to bring all the textures together.
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yeah thats what it was called tone mapping. thanks tyler
i have to say, i'm amazed that i did not manage to crash the material editor so far, despite extensive tests with combinations of nodes. what a world of difference from unreal 2.x stability.
i noticed that the tech doesn't seem to handle mirrored normals in a nice way out of the box? i get a very noticeable seam on my models. is there a workaround?
You sure can. Just like using UE2, you can use ActorX export a .PSK file and simply import into the engine. If you don't need bones, a .ASE file (static mesh) will work just fine.
"i noticed that the tech doesn't seem to handle mirrored normals in a nice way out of the box? i get a very noticeable seam on my models. is there a workaround?"
are you using lightmaps? One thing to try would be to make sure the mirrored half of your lightmap uv's are separated by a few pixels. That prevents some weird blending and blurring on lightmaps that will cause nasty seams.
"Sorry for asking a question in your thread. Can you add skeletal characters exported with ActorX into this? I wouldn't mind seeing how my work looks in UE3."
You sure can. Just like using UE2, you can use ActorX export a .PSK file and simply import into the engine. If you don't need bones, a .ASE file (static mesh) will work just fine.
"i noticed that the tech doesn't seem to handle mirrored normals in a nice way out of the box? i get a very noticeable seam on my models. is there a workaround?"
are you using lightmaps? One thing to try would be to make sure the mirrored half of your lightmap uv's are separated by a few pixels. That prevents some weird blending and blurring on lightmaps that will cause nasty seams.
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or you could just add a second uv channel with your mesh flattened with nothing overlaying for your lightmaps / ao pass...and put it all together in the editor
i tried importing assets made for other engines than what i used for my intitial test and i get the seams everywhere, as long as the uv's are mirrored.
all the normals have been generated with max/nvidia PS plugin and display just fine in the target environments for the respective assets.
this roboblitz UE so far looks like normalmapping tech from 2002.