To update your static meshes just reimport the ase files into your package. As long as they've got the same name they will replace what you've already got in there. Since meshes in the level are just referencing the meshes from the package they get updated automatically. Just make sure you don't change the mesh's pivot location as that will mess up the placement of your meshes in the level.
Is it possible to create your own screen effects (like someone mentioned vignetting earlier, and perhaps film grain, chromatic aberration, etc).
as billy said, sure you can do it, if you know how it works you can just create a material set it up to be unlit and plug it in your own postprocess chain, in fact vignette was a nice point, airborn has it now
ricgtclick in the package where you want it and create such a chain, you can add materials to it and also change the dof, bloom, color balance settings etc.
hacking it into ut without your own mod is a bit tricky and hacky and bad because it tends to crash, so a new mod with your data in it would definitely help you with that, then you can activate it in the utengine ini i think
I asked this question a little while ago in crazyfinger's thread, which was probably fairly rude.
My problem is that I want to be efficient with my UV space, but Unreal seems to not like this. If a shell is reversed and overlayed, the lighting is also reversed. I'm not sure if this just has to do with the normal map, but it shouldn't be effecting all the areas it does.
Here is an example of a chair prop I made a while ago, which I fixed the normal seam like shown in that tutorial thread here (so I doubt this is the problem):
(as you can see, the lighting is dark on one side and light on the other)
Is it a lightmap problem? I've seen Unreal props that reverse shells and it renders out okay.
Hey cycloveried Unreal pretty much hates normal maps + UV seams, but mirroring can still be done. Have you baked lighting on that chair? Have you made a 2nd channel UV set for your lightmap bake? I believe you cannot mirror UVs in the lightmap channel. It may also be necessary to merge the those two shells in the lightmap UV channel.
EDIT: I forgot to mention one other thing, you need to mirror your UVs left-right not up-down.
This is frustrating for me, because it seems like I'm the only one having problems!
So, I decided to do another test. This box is split down the middle, one side having a reversed shell (left-to-right // top-to-bottom). The texture is tile-able with diffuse/normal/spec. Channel 0 UV's are overlayed, while channel 1 UV's are not overlapping. Here are the results:
Ben - After testing both, it looks like the difference between mirroring horizontally and vertically is that the horizontal seam isnt as severe. On the UDN, however, they actually recommend you split the lightmaps at the mirroring seam. I tried this, too, and it reduces the specular seam with the slight tradeoff of a lightmap seam.
cycloverid - I had/have this problem and I got frustrated enough to just leave it be, however these two links explained a lot.
It gets somewhat complex, but to quote the UDN: "In general, Vertex light maps are the only way to completely avoid a seam." There are obvious seams all over UT3, so to me that says you just have to deal with it, although you can minimize it somewhat. Blame Epic.
Here's a comparison of the object I had trouble with:
Thanks Slainean, cool info about the lightmap UVs. I really should read the updated info on UDN from time to time, the last time I went through it all was in late 2006 :poly136: I had assumed that the lightmap UVs would be better if not split. I'll have to check this out.
Slainean: That first link is exactly what I was looking for! I had that favorited before, but I never got around to reading it and then lost it. :poly136:
I've been using UED for some time now. It's quite a nice editor, sometimes a bit too old fashionable but quite enjoyable overall. However, I'm having a bit of a trouble with lighting. I modelled a few generic modular pieces to block out my level (sidewalks, cubes, walls, etc...) and they look terribly wrong when I throw in some simple lighting. I tried vertex lighting at first but some vertices which share the same exact space look either really bright or pitch black. They are quite tessellated and line up perfectly to each other, so it doesn't make much sense. I know the limitations of vertex lighting, I just wanted my pieces to be lit evenly :S
OK I then proceeded to lightmap those meshes. I also removed some of the loops as they weren't really needed anymore. The problem still persists though and my lightmaps also look pretty bad, with seams visible in some places and other places being lit correctly. Here's an screenshot of the lightmapped version:
Blue = Also happens in the vertexlit version | Green = UVs problems
A montage showing the UVs for the lightmapped cube and the same meshes prepared for vertex lighting only. At first I thought the lighting artifacts on the cube was due to the seams being too close to the UV's borders so I scaled them down a bit and they still look the same in the editor.
One of the problems I see with your lightmap UVs is that they are too close together, the different shells need to be 3 or more pixels apart to avoid bleeding from each other.
Here's a nice light mapping tutorial by Stephen Jameson which explains the issue.
One of the problems I see with your lightmap UVs is that they are too close together, the different shells need to be 3 or more pixels apart to avoid bleeding from each other.
Here's a nice light mapping tutorial by Stephen Jameson which explains the issue.
Alright I was following the 3d buzz video tutorials and came across the same errors with vertex lit meshes I described above again. The funny thing is that 3d buzz's meshes look perfect.
Minotaur0 - After looking at the UDN, it looks like the shadows are averaging on those beams. The fix might be to turn off bUseSubdivisions. Check it out:
As for the problem you had earlier, I've fixed a similar problem by lowering the Subdivisionstepsize under Advanced Lighting, but that was for a small tiling prop. Maybe play with the min/maxsubdivisions as well?
Minotaur0 - After looking at the UDN, it looks like the shadows are averaging on those beams. The fix might be to turn off bUseSubdivisions. Check it out:
As for the problem you had earlier, I've fixed a similar problem by lowering the Subdivisionstepsize under Advanced Lighting, but that was for a small tiling prop. Maybe play with the min/maxsubdivisions as well?
@ Slainean - thanks man, great tutorials on your site! I am going to pour over the lighting ones as I have some skeletal meshes that are not accepting light for some reason.
I have written a program that analyses some text I input and then spits out a text file I can import into facefx durring analysis. I do this because I do not like the default facial movement facefx gives me using their default curve name. I have used facefx for a while in a workflow that suits my needs but have yet to learn some of the more advanced features due to a lack of public information.
I was wondering if there was a way to call multiple curves for a single phonym like right now my text file says this...
Hey guys what does it mean when the realtime preview check box on your mat nodes turns red. It just started doing this too all my materials for some reason. I can't really find any negative effects that it is having on my level but its making me uneasy since I don't know what it means.
I've checked out the thread and couldn't find it previously, but is there a way to get opacity in unreal besides just black or white, I'm looking to do a really fine mesh netting like stalkings. In max I have it at a dark light grey. Wondering if I can get this in unreal.
You can plug your alpha texture into the "Opacity" input of your material instead of "OpacityMask". Then you change the BlendMode of the material to BLEND_Translucent and your LightingModel to MLM_Unlit. What you end up with is a translucent material with the full range of opacity. The problem is that it cannot use the MLM_Phong LightingModel so it won't be lit properly like everything else.
If someone has figured out to make a lit tranlucent material I'd love to know too.
hey everyone. i just got unreal 3 the other day and have been messing around with it for quite some time. currently i am working on a dead space scene that i would like to eventually bring into the engine. this is what brings me to my question.
in my scene i am currently working on a hologram projector, in 3ds max i am using the particle system to make this projector act as a free floating sprite, so that it will always face the camera. is there any way to do this in unreal?
Have two questions about UT3 mitmapping large textures and down rezing them like crap.
Now I read earlier that Neox said he was able to get around this by changing his textures to DXT5 instead of the DXT1 compression and enabling Skybox in the texture group.
I tried this but I still get my textures down rezed extremely badly every time I close UT3. 4 and 2k textures look as if they are 1k or 512 and it dosnt update if I actually play the game.
I also tried the LOD -1 thing mentioned in a post or two after but that didnt seem to save it either. I seem to need to click the Never Streamed check mark on each of my textures (this dosnt save on shut down and will have to reimport textures again).
Is there a way to force them to stay uncompressed? I am just making a small scene and I dont need to worry about mitmapping and memory so much as its just an environment peice.
Should I save my textures out as a DXT5 texture straight from photoshop instead of just a TGA?
Secondly is there a way to force downrezing not to happen in a scene or set the distance? I get noticable texture downrezing pops even when I am extreamly close to an asset. It seems to only use my full rez texture if I am standing pretty much on it. Moving like 5 feet from any asset will make it drop.
I am having some weird problems with my lightmaps, I read through all the previous posts on the last page about this stuff but I still cant figure it out. It seems like when I import my mesh into unreal it is shifting random uv chunks around, resulting in lots of overlapping. I thought maybe it was doing it because my uvs were not spread out enough, so I did a quick uv pack to get even spacing and test to see if that was the problem. But aftter importing that into unreal it still decided to shift stuff around. Any one know whats going on?
Autocon - As far as I understand it, streaming assets is a core design of UE3, so it's a pain if you want to work around it. Like you said, I usually turn the LODBias to -1 for all my textures. I remember reading about a trick where you check defer compression when you import the textures, then uncheck defer compression before saving. I haven't ever tried it yet, but maybe it's been patched out. Basically, there's not a whole lot you can do about it.
nrek - Obvious question, but are your lightmap UVs set to channel 2 or 3 in Max? Unreal considers 0 to be channel 1, and in that pic your lightmap UVs are set to 2, which is the same as channel 3 in Max. Also keep in mind that you can have multiple UVs for your textures/materials on one mesh, but the lightmap UVs must be shared for the whole mesh.
Sorry I should have mentioned I had 3 uvs to begin with. Channel 0 in unreal (1 in max) is my base textures, channel 1 in unreal (2 in max) is a second channel for a blend material to add grunge over the tiled textures. Channel 2 in unreal (3 in max) is for the light map. And everything is laid out to be unique in the lightmap, with all the seams cut to match the base materials symmetry lines.
That's definitely weird. The only thing I can think of is resetting xforms, making sure everything is within the 0-1 space, and all that good stuff. Maybe max is corrupting the model somehow. Hopefully someone more experienced will know what's up.
Thx Slainean, unfortunately resetting the X-form didn't work, clearing all the uvs and then reimporting the uvw files 1 by 1 didnt work, merging the object into a new file didnt work. BUT I did fix it. I had to export 3 copies of the meshas objs, each with one of the three uv channels set as their 1st uv channel. I imported them all into a new file then when they were in there I had to open all their unwraps and save each of them out as uvs1 uvs2 uvs3, I could then take those uv files and load them into the uv slots of a sinlge main mesh that was then imported into unreal. What a pain in the ass.
you some times need to flush lightmap information by hitting UV Co ords back to 0 and back to what you want, else when you reimport a mesh it'll bake horribly. Bad bug!
Give that a go and check the static mesh instance isnt over-ridden to static lighting res of 0
yea exactly anytime you change the lightmap uvs, you gotta set it to another channel after importing, rebake then switch it back and bake again for ti to pick up the new uvs. this is a super lame bug in unreal and it even was happening using beast a while back.
Hello, i'am doing some vegetation stuff in Unreal atm (tropical island). So my textures rely on transparency all the time. The shadows casted by those textures dont take into account the trasparency.
Right now I have one solution wich is to convert the mest to a mover.
But what if I have a whole jungle full of transperency? Do you guys/girls have another solution.
Thanks .
Replies
To update your static meshes just reimport the ase files into your package. As long as they've got the same name they will replace what you've already got in there. Since meshes in the level are just referencing the meshes from the package they get updated automatically. Just make sure you don't change the mesh's pivot location as that will mess up the placement of your meshes in the level.
-N!
as billy said, sure you can do it, if you know how it works you can just create a material set it up to be unlit and plug it in your own postprocess chain, in fact vignette was a nice point, airborn has it now
hacking it into ut without your own mod is a bit tricky and hacky and bad because it tends to crash, so a new mod with your data in it would definitely help you with that, then you can activate it in the utengine ini i think
My problem is that I want to be efficient with my UV space, but Unreal seems to not like this. If a shell is reversed and overlayed, the lighting is also reversed. I'm not sure if this just has to do with the normal map, but it shouldn't be effecting all the areas it does.
Here is an example of a chair prop I made a while ago, which I fixed the normal seam like shown in that tutorial thread here (so I doubt this is the problem):
(as you can see, the lighting is dark on one side and light on the other)
Is it a lightmap problem? I've seen Unreal props that reverse shells and it renders out okay.
Thanks for looking.
EDIT: I forgot to mention one other thing, you need to mirror your UVs left-right not up-down.
This is frustrating for me, because it seems like I'm the only one having problems!
So, I decided to do another test. This box is split down the middle, one side having a reversed shell (left-to-right // top-to-bottom). The texture is tile-able with diffuse/normal/spec. Channel 0 UV's are overlayed, while channel 1 UV's are not overlapping. Here are the results:
Inversed Top-to-Bottom UV's breaks it?
You need to split your lightmap UVs along the same seams made by mirroring on the 1st channel UVs.
Ignore this text, I'm just leaving it here so the conversation in the following posts makes sense:
Those are the lightmap UVs right? I think if you merged those shells it might work out ok.
You also need to mirror the triangulation for the parts of the mesh that will have mirrored UVs as well, if you're not doing it already.
It may sound strange but I believe Unreal also takes the orientation of the UVs into account when shading things.
EDIT:
Here's an example of mirroring UVs in Unreal.
EDIT 2:
This is what happens if you mirror your UVs the wrong way.
cycloverid - I had/have this problem and I got frustrated enough to just leave it be, however these two links explained a lot.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/LightMapUnwrapping.html
http://gearsforums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?p=26161072
It gets somewhat complex, but to quote the UDN: "In general, Vertex light maps are the only way to completely avoid a seam." There are obvious seams all over UT3, so to me that says you just have to deal with it, although you can minimize it somewhat. Blame Epic.
Here's a comparison of the object I had trouble with:
Slainean: That first link is exactly what I was looking for! I had that favorited before, but I never got around to reading it and then lost it. :poly136:
Thanks again.
I've been using UED for some time now. It's quite a nice editor, sometimes a bit too old fashionable but quite enjoyable overall. However, I'm having a bit of a trouble with lighting. I modelled a few generic modular pieces to block out my level (sidewalks, cubes, walls, etc...) and they look terribly wrong when I throw in some simple lighting. I tried vertex lighting at first but some vertices which share the same exact space look either really bright or pitch black. They are quite tessellated and line up perfectly to each other, so it doesn't make much sense. I know the limitations of vertex lighting, I just wanted my pieces to be lit evenly :S
OK I then proceeded to lightmap those meshes. I also removed some of the loops as they weren't really needed anymore. The problem still persists though and my lightmaps also look pretty bad, with seams visible in some places and other places being lit correctly. Here's an screenshot of the lightmapped version:
Blue = Also happens in the vertexlit version | Green = UVs problems
A montage showing the UVs for the lightmapped cube and the same meshes prepared for vertex lighting only. At first I thought the lighting artifacts on the cube was due to the seams being too close to the UV's borders so I scaled them down a bit and they still look the same in the editor.
Does anyone know how to work around this?
Here's a nice light mapping tutorial by Stephen Jameson which explains the issue.
http://stephenjameson.com/tutorials/lightmap-uvs-tutorial/
Ohh that's quite useful thanks a lot!
I stitched all my seams together because I read somewhere that the less seams the better. But it does not seem to be the case for lightmap uvs.
The vertex lighting inconsistencies still persist though.
EDIT:
Ok, fixed up my example image and post.
This is really pissing me off
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/LightingReference.html#Lighting%20Subdivisions
As for the problem you had earlier, I've fixed a similar problem by lowering the Subdivisionstepsize under Advanced Lighting, but that was for a small tiling prop. Maybe play with the min/maxsubdivisions as well?
http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UT3_Asset_Lighting_Tweaking_Tutorial.html
damn its only vertex lighting
That fixed the problems, thanks a lot!
I was wondering if there was a way to call multiple curves for a single phonym like right now my text file says this...
I would like to assign "Jaw_Down" and "Eyes_Left" when the character says "if"
if this is possible, how is this represented in the syntax?
lastly, If there are facefx resources out there can someone send me a link?
Double Edit: It looks like it makes all your nodes realtime instead of setting them individually, I guess.
You can plug your alpha texture into the "Opacity" input of your material instead of "OpacityMask". Then you change the BlendMode of the material to BLEND_Translucent and your LightingModel to MLM_Unlit. What you end up with is a translucent material with the full range of opacity. The problem is that it cannot use the MLM_Phong LightingModel so it won't be lit properly like everything else.
If someone has figured out to make a lit tranlucent material I'd love to know too.
in my scene i am currently working on a hologram projector, in 3ds max i am using the particle system to make this projector act as a free floating sprite, so that it will always face the camera. is there any way to do this in unreal?
Now I read earlier that Neox said he was able to get around this by changing his textures to DXT5 instead of the DXT1 compression and enabling Skybox in the texture group.
I tried this but I still get my textures down rezed extremely badly every time I close UT3. 4 and 2k textures look as if they are 1k or 512 and it dosnt update if I actually play the game.
I also tried the LOD -1 thing mentioned in a post or two after but that didnt seem to save it either. I seem to need to click the Never Streamed check mark on each of my textures (this dosnt save on shut down and will have to reimport textures again).
Is there a way to force them to stay uncompressed? I am just making a small scene and I dont need to worry about mitmapping and memory so much as its just an environment peice.
Should I save my textures out as a DXT5 texture straight from photoshop instead of just a TGA?
Secondly is there a way to force downrezing not to happen in a scene or set the distance? I get noticable texture downrezing pops even when I am extreamly close to an asset. It seems to only use my full rez texture if I am standing pretty much on it. Moving like 5 feet from any asset will make it drop.
Thanks,
-Auto
nrek - Obvious question, but are your lightmap UVs set to channel 2 or 3 in Max? Unreal considers 0 to be channel 1, and in that pic your lightmap UVs are set to 2, which is the same as channel 3 in Max. Also keep in mind that you can have multiple UVs for your textures/materials on one mesh, but the lightmap UVs must be shared for the whole mesh.
Give that a go and check the static mesh instance isnt over-ridden to static lighting res of 0
PS it was a feature
Right now I have one solution wich is to convert the mest to a mover.
But what if I have a whole jungle full of transperency? Do you guys/girls have another solution.
Thanks .