You're not doing it right . You probably clicked and flipped so many options you're tainting the results. Make a new scene, place the model as static mesh, add a light and flick on modulate.
Not sure if this helps, I don't even know what shadow acne is. This is just Lightshadowmode_Normal, 2 dynamic lights and settings for the lights, static mesh and bsp. No soft dynamic shadows though. I had a go at the modulated shadows but the lights stopped casting a shadow altogether, probably like Lamont says and too many options already messed about with. A reset settings to default option would be nice.
thanks for the responses psixos and lamount,
if u back up in the thread, u will see I was looking for "dynamic" shadows solutions.
Not really interested in environments and level design
but shadows to show off animated character design ( skeletal mesh )
my problem with shadows dissapearing after rebuild was from the
"Use Direct Light Map" setting that is checked on by default when a light is created.
there is no shortage of static mesh lightmapping documentation.
my dynamic shadow notes so far... ( please correct me if anything below is obviously wrong )
2. shadow LOD causing shadows to dissapear at distances. this may have been fixed ( @ service pack 3 ) as leaving shadow map resolution @ 0 min and max results in no LOD popping. changing this number results in LOD problems. either leave it @ 0 or: upping the resolution to 1024 or above for min max will also git rid of the LOD ( in editor in game application tests... at least so far )
3. The "Use Direct Light Map" check box in light properties will cause the shadow cast to dissapear from static and bsp surfaces after rebuild.
4. shadow filter quality: high / projection technique: BPCF gives best reults. ( still have shadow acne bias problems. z-fighting floating point errors )
5. force dynamic light checkbox nullifies all the shadow options and makes yer light a stencil shadow. ( stencil shadows will always have the aforementioned LOD popping/dissapearing )
6. Layer brightness. Using mutiple dynamic lights ( one for the ground and wall brightness/shadows and one for the character/skeletal mesh's brightness/self-shadowing ) with lighting channels for light linking assignment gives a lot of control over the final look..
anyone know if theres a way to force mip level usage on a texture sample in the material editor?
I want to import a cube map that has various mip levels, using lowest for one material type and highest for another. Is there a way to pull from different mip levels within the material editor? It'd be really useful to save on texture calls..
ok guys i accidentally posted a thread about this but my question my get a faster response here
ok so i was wondering about something. i know with linear interpolate and material instance you can make a mesh switch between two different textures. is there a way to do the same thing with more, say about 5 different textures
I am having issues with UV seams on a static mesh in Ued3. The object does not have a material applied, however all the UV seams are visible.
No split verts. All faces set to smooth group 1. No lightmap. No texture. One single map channel. No overlapping UV islands. Imported static mesh from max as ASE file.
In my search about uv seams in Ued some people talk about using a second map channel to cover UV seams. Although I dont see a detailed explanation on it, also it has to do with lightmaps and im not using any yet. Does anyone do use this second channel to cover seams? What is a common workflow for covering UV seams when working in Ued3?
Micro, you mean when you import your mesh and it puts the default checker matieral you see the seams? I think thats normal because it's just a tiled checker pattern. What happens when you create your texture and put it on?
Anyways, I have a general question:
When I open up UT maps from Epic to check out their props, I notice that pratically all their static meshes are fully enclosed. That is, they don't delete any faces that get hidden. Even when the other side doesn't have any modular use at all. I even see hidden sides mapped with junk images. Is there a specific reason for this?
alexk - i remember reading somewhere on the udn with way that culling (removing polys not seen from rendering) works in unreal engine 3 (each polygon culls all polys behind) works better with closed meshes. may also be other reasons but i'm pretty sure thats it. could be wrong though.
Hi !
I'm having some problems with one of my mesh, here is a screenshot to understand:
As you can see, everything looks fine in the Static Mesh Editor(Same in Maya), but in the UnrealEd viewport and in-game, some edges are looking like hard-edges for specular, just between both parts of the symmetry I made.
*There isn't any normal map yet.
*Vertex are correctly welded.
*UVs correctly welded.
*Edges hardness correctly set.
*Faces normals look right.
I don't know if there is a way to solve this problem... Anyone can help ?
Is there a way to select an object from a list comprised of all assets currently in the scene or level? Or, is there a way to change the size of the icons that represent these objects. I am finding that items like skylights way up high in a large level are near impossible to again find by manually looking for it.
or even a selection marquee would do, I know the general area of my assets even but I dont see a marquee selector either and lightbulbs get to be pretty small with 256 sized levels...
There's grouping and there's the binoculars up top. You can find by searching a string there. Also, name your objects. StaticMeshActorXXX drives some people mad.
When I hit the tilde key my Reference Coordinate System goes from World to Local, No console or command line appears. this is of course not during playback. During playback nothing happens
Ok I got a quick question, I can't get my static meshes to shadow onto the terrain. I've played about and tried to look up info etc. but no luck so far.
Here's an example, I put it into an existing level and rebaked all the lighting but this is how it turned out still.
Carlo, are you setting a lightmap resolution for your floor asset + generator? You do that within the static mesh browser. Also, make sure whatever light actor you're using to make sure it isn't filtering out static meshes in it's properties (F4).
ng.aniki: did that solution end up working? I had similar issues in the past and the way I fixed it was not how Lamont stated... I just need to go back and figure out what I did end up doin.
There's grouping and there's the binoculars up top. You can find by searching a string there. Also, name your objects. StaticMeshActorXXX drives some people mad.
it makes me happy to hunt down staticmeshactor931.
ng.aniki: did that solution end up working? I had similar issues in the past and the way I fixed it was not how Lamont stated... I just need to go back and figure out what I did end up doin.
Nope, I tried it, and it did not work for me...
If you could find out how you solved this problem before, it would be really nice, that's not the first time I have that kind of glitch.
While similar I don't think it's quite the same as it was an issue with the normal map unfortunately ... Try adding one to the material and check both 2-sided and texgroup-normal.
If you have an independent spec map I'd also try reimporting that with 2-sided checked as well.
Why is it that skylights dont light up my Terrain? the other lights do... I checked the lighting channels and BSP is checked along with static, what am I missing?
I have a question about terrain this time... it appears that even though I can add a bunch of Terrain material layers, if I use the paint tool with more than 4 material layers active, Ued3 will crash. Is this an issue? I tried with textures at 2048x originally and just now with 1024x textures. everything works just fine with both sizes until I add that 5th material layer then crash.
Is this a limitation of Ued? cause Horences site states around 6 being the max number...? Is there a way to bake the materials into the terrain bsp? if so then I could maintain only 4 material layers in the editor and take them out when finished with them, then bake and continue?
I have this feeling that its the actual terrain editors window limitation and not the editor itself. The terrain edit window only has space for 4 material layers, however the editor creates a package in the generic browser and I am successfully adding layers to that package, but alas! Crash!
Please help... i dont see how anyone lives with only 4 textures on a wide open environment Terrain!
I have a question about terrain this time... it appears that even though I can add a bunch of Terrain material layers, if I use the paint tool with more than 4 material layers active, Ued3 will crash. Is this an issue? I tried with textures at 2048x originally and just now with 1024x textures. everything works just fine with both sizes until I add that 5th material layer then crash.
Is this a limitation of Ued? cause Horences site states around 6 being the max number...? Is there a way to bake the materials into the terrain bsp? if so then I could maintain only 4 material layers in the editor and take them out when finished with them, then bake and continue?
I have this feeling that its the actual terrain editors window limitation and not the editor itself. The terrain edit window only has space for 4 material layers, however the editor creates a package in the generic browser and I am successfully adding layers to that package, but alas! Crash!
Please help... i dont see how anyone lives with only 4 textures on a wide open environment Terrain!
You cant have more that 6 AFAIK because of the way that unreal terrain shader system works. It does not work like the regular material editor it takes all the terrain materials that you have and makes one huge shader out of it making it a very costly on your GPU. So if you have a graphic card that's middle range but not top of the line you might just have maxed out your card and that is why you can only have 4. Or you might need to get the latest driver that would be the first thing I would tey.
I was talking to Horences yesterday about this Terrain issue in a couple quick emails, he was really busy but is convinced that you can have more than 4 and kind of up to 8 or 12 running. This basically makes it a fact that 4 is not a limit. So something is wrong on my end... Technically there are limitless textures....he said... also that the complexity of the materials determines how many materials you can have running at once... Obviously the "complexity" is a bit vague but I stripped the materials to Diffuse only @ 1024x1024 each. Still the same issue of crashing as soon as I try to paint the 5th mat.. I can set up as many layers as I want but unfortunatley no go once I use them, unless 4 or less... if so everything is fine.
I dont think my CPU/GPU is a problem, I just picked up a Core i7 and the 260 gtx, it is a consumer gamer card, not a pro quadro or whatever but I dont think there is a problem on that front.
The size of my terrain is 256x256 so maybe thats the problem, today (right now) im going to check out if a smaller size makes a difference.
I was talking to Horences yesterday about this Terrain issue in a couple quick emails, he was really busy but is convinced that you can have more than 4 and kind of up to 8 or 12 running. This basically makes it a fact that 4 is not a limit. So something is wrong on my end... Technically there are limitless textures....he said... also that the complexity of the materials determines how many materials you can have running at once... Obviously the "complexity" is a bit vague but I stripped the materials to Diffuse only @ 1024x1024 each. Still the same issue of crashing as soon as I try to paint the 5th mat.. I can set up as many layers as I want but unfortunatley no go once I use them, unless 4 or less... if so everything is fine.
I dont think my CPU/GPU is a problem, I just picked up a Core i7 and the 260 gtx, it is a consumer gamer card, not a pro quadro or whatever but I dont think there is a problem on that front.
The size of my terrain is 256x256 so maybe thats the problem, today (right now) im going to check out if a smaller size makes a difference.
eitherway blillyclint thanks for the time
Hum very weird that it is not working now that you just have just diffuse textures only on the terrain. Your card and processor are blazing fast so I am 100% sure that its not them now that you told me what you have. Did you try updating your graphic drivers to the latest ones? Also what are you using UT3 or GOW?
Have you tried making a new test level to see if maybe your level that you are working on is corrupted it could be that. I would make a small room add terrain and then add lots of layers to it and see if you get the same thing to happen.
I have been using the same file over and over, shrinking and expanding the x / y num-patch values from 256 down to 64 and back up to test this out. I think you are right, perhaps ill start fresh... perhaps reimport the textures as well. new bugs are cropping up with the layer textures displaying the wrong material now...
All my materials are made of .tga format textures if thats an issue, i dont know... it looks like they are compressed to something else tho
I just built this rig, however I did use the driver it came with on the cd, i kinda blew it off like this is a new card so not many issues...rookie mistake.... im getting the new driver now... thanks.
deleted all level files and material / texture packages
imported all textures again, created new materials (diffuse only)...
created new terrain, with default properties except tesselation max set to 8 and patch size 64x64. no lights, no other mesh, just the terrain and the red builder brush in the scene.
Could add 4 material but in the terrain editing window, no more than 4 was aloud. Added one more material in that package terrain creates then added that layer and texture to the editing window by selecting it and using the "add selection to window" button on the editor window. It works, 5 layers appear with their correct textures....so then I paint a stroke... but before anything appears other than the default texture
CRASH! -
I can live with 4 materials, its not end of the world - the only thing that bothers me is that somewhere out there.. behind the diamond encrusted door of UE3 enlightenment, someone else is using 5! GAH! GAH! ack! cough! splat.
I've managed to hack my way to 7 simple (diffuse only) materials onto Ued3 terrain. Took me all day, but here is what I have discovered.
Ued3 pretty much hates vista Aero, or so it would appear. Although not totally fixing the problem, it helped a lot with crashiness when aero was off.
Ued3 terrain will not behave well unless all packages you are going to use are loaded first. This must be a no-brainer for some, but I thought I could load a package after loading a level. Sometimes the textures would pop in - sometimes it would crash if you load mat packs after the level.
No matter what I did, after the first time I created all the terrain material layers, if the number exceeded 4, it would 100% of the time crash when I tried to paint the first material. No stopping this for me.
if I load all the Terrain material layers and attach all their terrain textures.
Save level, save material pack then exit the editor, restart it >load material pack first from generic browser > Load Level >Paint, it worked.
I was able to get 7 materials mixing on the terrain this way. If I added a new package (UN_Sky - for the skyboxes) to the browser, crash... then I restart the editor and add that package first, then load the level, everything was fine. So whenever I want a new package added to the browser I must exit the editor first after saving and load every package again first then continue.
Does anyone know if this is common, that all packages must be loaded before you load a level otherwise its risky?
Thanks billy for the help, I am doing more testing here, see how far I can now push the complexity of the materials. I wont post again I guess since I got it working somewhat, but if your reading this and have any information or used Ued3 Terrain a lot, lets chat for a bit please... thanks.
I've managed to hack my way to 7 simple (diffuse only) materials onto Ued3 terrain. Took me all day, but here is what I have discovered.
Ued3 pretty much hates vista Aero, or so it would appear. Although not totally fixing the problem, it helped a lot with crashiness when aero was off.
Ued3 terrain will not behave well unless all packages you are going to use are loaded first. This must be a no-brainer for some, but I thought I could load a package after loading a level. Sometimes the textures would pop in - sometimes it would crash if you load mat packs after the level.
No matter what I did, after the first time I created all the terrain material layers, if the number exceeded 4, it would 100% of the time crash when I tried to paint the first material. No stopping this for me.
if I load all the Terrain material layers and attach all their terrain textures.
Save level, save material pack then exit the editor, restart it >load material pack first from generic browser > Load Level >Paint, it worked.
I was able to get 7 materials mixing on the terrain this way. If I added a new package (UN_Sky - for the skyboxes) to the browser, crash... then I restart the editor and add that package first, then load the level, everything was fine. So whenever I want a new package added to the browser I must exit the editor first after saving and load every package again first then continue.
Does anyone know if this is common, that all packages must be loaded before you load a level otherwise its risky?
Thanks billy for the help, I am doing more testing here, see how far I can now push the complexity of the materials. I wont post again I guess since I got it working somewhat, but if your reading this and have any information or used Ued3 Terrain a lot, lets chat for a bit please... thanks.
Humm these are all quite strange errors that you are getting as I know that this should work for you as its not that complex.
I use UT3 editor at home and the GOW editor and I have never run into this problem where after my map is open and I load a package I get a crash. Have you tried to delete your .ini files in your config folder. I think that this is where they are at I am at work now and I cant remeber where exactly where thet are but sometimes when I have issuse I delete these files and then re-open the editor. If you dont have these files when you laucnh the editor unreal will make a fresh version of them for you. Something in there might be causing the issue also do you get any type of error on your crash or better yet a log you can post?
I have it going now if I follow that mess I described... but you have me worried that I will come across a full stop sometime in the process...or my install is corrupt or something.
Anyway, I have another question since I have your ear - I want to pull out, or even just view the UV's for the skybox static mesh objects. This way I can map my own images to them. Is this possible?
I have it going now if I follow that mess I described... but you have me worried that I will come across a full stop sometime in the process...or my install is corrupt or something.
Anyway, I have another question since I have your ear - I want to pull out, or even just view the UV's for the skybox static mesh objects. This way I can map my own images to them. Is this possible?
Do you mean exporting out of Unreal for use in 3ds Max? If that is what you want to do and my gut is telling me you do I am sorry to say that you cant. Epic does not allow you to export mesh out of packages any more(well in the retail editor anyway I am sure you can do it in the legit version). I remember hearing from someone at work that some took a GOW code drop and took all the meshes, textures, and characters exported them out tweaked them just a bit and put them into another game. So after that Epic took the ability to export anything back out of the engine.
Now there are some things that you can do to get around this.
1: Get 3Ds Max or any other 3D program and learn how to model this and just make your own. (I am totally not trying to be mean I am just letting you know what your options are.)
2: If you are just wanting to move the UV's around a bit you could do it Via the material editor with a pan command and some tweaking.
3: There is this program out there that at run time will capture and save everything that is on your graphis card to a file that you can then open in a 3D program or in Photoshop. But the name of the program tottaly eludes me right now. Ahh I know what it is I just cant think of it. I know I will think of it or maybe someone else knows what I am talking about and can chime in.
1) Everytime I want to delete a mesh/material/texture from one of my packages that I make myself, it keeps telling me something about it's references. Like say I want to remove a mesh, even though I try to delete every single instance of the mesh in the scene, it'll still say it's linked somewhere and won't let me delete it. How do I completely unlink something I want to delete?
2) How do I move something into a group after I've imported it? Like say I imported a mesh into the main package folder, but later on, I made a "Mesh" folder in my package and I want to move the mesh into that folder.
For Terrain, I found that if I wanted to delete material layers, first I had to delete the textures within those layers. It wont work the other way and delete everything inside. You have to logically work backwards from the way you created everything. Also after I deleted those textures I had to save current level again to update that package, then delete. I found some items like that layers would not delete from the package visually, but once i removed all the textures and references from the terrain edit window, they would disapear after i saved the level.
IE: If you want to delete a texture you have imported into a package, make sure its not referenced in a material you have. then also keep your level saved as well, after you remove the references. This will free the item to be removed.
2) How do I move something into a group after I've imported it? Like say I imported a mesh into the main package folder, but later on, I made a "Mesh" folder in my package and I want to move the mesh into that folder.
Nothing is ever removed from a package. It's still "there" no matter what you do to it. Best bet is to have a solid workflow for your Unreal UPK's. No one really talks about having a good UPK workflow, but it's freakin' important to have dicipline on that shit.
To move an item from folder to folder or UPK to UPK, you have to rename it. Just change the folder/UPK name. Keep in mind that you still need to keep the originating UPK/folder as it redirects Unreal to the new UPK/folder. If an item is there of the same name (no matter what it is), it will get overwriten.
So as soon as you rename save the originating UPK first, then the new UPK. If UnrealED crashes and you didn't save the originating UPK, but you did save the new one, you're in for a world of hurt.
basically as everyone knows when you import your textures in ue3 it compresses them and you lose alot of detail, is there anyway i could get around this issue with a hack of some sort.
basically as everyone knows when you import your textures in ue3 it compresses them and you lose alot of detail, is there anyway i could get around this issue with a hack of some sort.
I've asked this too and the only thing I've found to combat this is to set the LODbias in a textures setting to a negative value. If it's set to zero, then it automatically changes the textures resolution to a certain degree depending on it's LODgroup. So your 1024 is getting resized to 512 if it's in the default world lod group and LODbias is zero. So setting it to -1, will keep it at 1024. and -2 if your texture is 2048, and so on. This is how I understand it at least, and it's suppose to be kept at zero if its intended for play, but setting it to a negative is suppose to be fine for portfolio stuff since you're just showing it off anyways
if you cant set negative values, then you could always double the size of the texture? I think you can make the LOD's yourself too, so you can be sure what texture it is LOD'ing to. I havent done any of this... I think I know this through Polycount Osmosis...
delete your .ini files in your config folder. I think that this is where they are at I am at work now and I cant remeber where exactly where thet are but sometimes when I have issuse I delete these files and then re-open the editor. If you dont have these files when you laucnh the editor unreal will make a fresh version of them for you.
Hey man, there were 13 ini files in the config folder, when I delete all of them (except DefaultEngine!) it does ask if I want to renew (the ini files are "outdated" in the error message) a bunch of ini's so I accept, however now that I did some testing inside engine (appears to act exactly the same way) and shutdown safely... those 12 ini files I removed, have not been recreated.
The editor is asking me if I want to renew the ini files everytime I restart...
beside all this, the same layering problem is happing, so im just going to restore those files I removed I guess...
EDIT: Another Terrain Error I am seeing follows: I have 8 layers of materials in my terrain editor now, trying to push is a bit further, and found that unless I paint in all four corners of the terrain mesh with the last material in the layer stack (the literal bottom layer) none of the other materials above will appear. I can then go back and remove that last material once the whole stack of layers kind of pops into place on the terrain... I wish I was making this up...
1) Everytime I want to delete a mesh/material/texture from one of my packages that I make myself, it keeps telling me something about it's references. Like say I want to remove a mesh, even though I try to delete every single instance of the mesh in the scene, it'll still say it's linked somewhere and won't let me delete it. How do I completely unlink something I want to delete?
2) How do I move something into a group after I've imported it? Like say I imported a mesh into the main package folder, but later on, I made a "Mesh" folder in my package and I want to move the mesh into that folder.
Ah this is another one of those Unreal bugs that happens only when you do not have good UPK work flow and a solid naming convention going into the project.
When you put something in a package unreal keeps a running total of what items have been in that pack this includes if the item has been "Deleted". I have run into errors where i deleted something from the package to find that I can not re-import that object because its name is in use.
To complicate matters even further if you link from one package to another unreal keeps track of that and down the road if you want to take something out you often find that you cant because of this cross package referencing.
AFAIK there is not "Fix" for this but as one guy in here said already you should have some sort of naming game plan for naming your custom assets. This is also good practice if you are trying to get a job in the game industry. I can't tell you mad it makes me when files don't follow the correct naming convention. -D and _D are not the same and when dealing with lots of files little mistakes like this can mess up the way the assets are displayed and grouped together in Unreal, Explorer, and Perforce.
If you really cannot delete anything truly, and as you work you find that there are several materials you will not use in your level. Will your bloated package effect performance on your level even if those materials are not used in the level? Or is it that because the unused mats are in an active package they are taking up performance budgets?
If this is the case I assume packages are rebuilt a lot?
Replies
thanks for the responses psixos and lamount,
if u back up in the thread, u will see I was looking for "dynamic" shadows solutions.
Not really interested in environments and level design
but shadows to show off animated character design ( skeletal mesh )
my problem with shadows dissapearing after rebuild was from the
"Use Direct Light Map" setting that is checked on by default when a light is created.
there is no shortage of static mesh lightmapping documentation.
my dynamic shadow notes so far... ( please correct me if anything below is obviously wrong )
this may have been fixed ( @ service pack 3 ) as leaving shadow map
resolution @ 0 min and max results in no LOD popping. changing this number results in
LOD problems. either leave it @ 0 or:
upping the resolution to 1024 or above for min max will also git rid of the LOD ( in editor in
game application tests... at least so far )
3. The "Use Direct Light Map" check box in light properties will cause the shadow cast to dissapear from static and bsp surfaces after rebuild.
4. shadow filter quality: high / projection technique: BPCF gives best reults. ( still have shadow acne bias problems. z-fighting floating point errors )
5. force dynamic light checkbox nullifies all the shadow options and makes yer light a stencil shadow. ( stencil shadows will always have the aforementioned LOD popping/dissapearing )
6. Layer brightness. Using mutiple dynamic lights ( one for the ground and wall brightness/shadows and one for the character/skeletal mesh's brightness/self-shadowing ) with lighting channels for light linking assignment gives a lot of control over the final look..
I want to import a cube map that has various mip levels, using lowest for one material type and highest for another. Is there a way to pull from different mip levels within the material editor? It'd be really useful to save on texture calls..
ok so i was wondering about something. i know with linear interpolate and material instance you can make a mesh switch between two different textures. is there a way to do the same thing with more, say about 5 different textures
I am having issues with UV seams on a static mesh in Ued3. The object does not have a material applied, however all the UV seams are visible.
No split verts. All faces set to smooth group 1. No lightmap. No texture. One single map channel. No overlapping UV islands. Imported static mesh from max as ASE file.
In my search about uv seams in Ued some people talk about using a second map channel to cover UV seams. Although I dont see a detailed explanation on it, also it has to do with lightmaps and im not using any yet. Does anyone do use this second channel to cover seams? What is a common workflow for covering UV seams when working in Ued3?
Anyways, I have a general question:
When I open up UT maps from Epic to check out their props, I notice that pratically all their static meshes are fully enclosed. That is, they don't delete any faces that get hidden. Even when the other side doesn't have any modular use at all. I even see hidden sides mapped with junk images. Is there a specific reason for this?
I'm having some problems with one of my mesh, here is a screenshot to understand:
As you can see, everything looks fine in the Static Mesh Editor(Same in Maya), but in the UnrealEd viewport and in-game, some edges are looking like hard-edges for specular, just between both parts of the symmetry I made.
*There isn't any normal map yet.
*Vertex are correctly welded.
*UVs correctly welded.
*Edges hardness correctly set.
*Faces normals look right.
I don't know if there is a way to solve this problem... Anyone can help ?
Thanks !
or even a selection marquee would do, I know the general area of my assets even but I dont see a marquee selector either and lightbulbs get to be pretty small with 256 sized levels...
Thanks ! I'll try that as soon as I get home
you can hit the windows button and then click on the maximize window button if you want to go fullscreen.
or you can hit ~ and type "setres 1024x768" without quotes. if you want to do it via command line
Here's an example, I put it into an existing level and rebaked all the lighting but this is how it turned out still.
ng.aniki: did that solution end up working? I had similar issues in the past and the way I fixed it was not how Lamont stated... I just need to go back and figure out what I did end up doin.
If you could find out how you solved this problem before, it would be really nice, that's not the first time I have that kind of glitch.
If you have an independent spec map I'd also try reimporting that with 2-sided checked as well.
Is this a limitation of Ued? cause Horences site states around 6 being the max number...? Is there a way to bake the materials into the terrain bsp? if so then I could maintain only 4 material layers in the editor and take them out when finished with them, then bake and continue?
I have this feeling that its the actual terrain editors window limitation and not the editor itself. The terrain edit window only has space for 4 material layers, however the editor creates a package in the generic browser and I am successfully adding layers to that package, but alas! Crash!
Please help... i dont see how anyone lives with only 4 textures on a wide open environment Terrain!
Why not import it as a static mesh do your testing and then re-export as your skeletal mesh.
You cant have more that 6 AFAIK because of the way that unreal terrain shader system works. It does not work like the regular material editor it takes all the terrain materials that you have and makes one huge shader out of it making it a very costly on your GPU. So if you have a graphic card that's middle range but not top of the line you might just have maxed out your card and that is why you can only have 4. Or you might need to get the latest driver that would be the first thing I would tey.
I dont think my CPU/GPU is a problem, I just picked up a Core i7 and the 260 gtx, it is a consumer gamer card, not a pro quadro or whatever but I dont think there is a problem on that front.
The size of my terrain is 256x256 so maybe thats the problem, today (right now) im going to check out if a smaller size makes a difference.
eitherway blillyclint thanks for the time
Hum very weird that it is not working now that you just have just diffuse textures only on the terrain. Your card and processor are blazing fast so I am 100% sure that its not them now that you told me what you have. Did you try updating your graphic drivers to the latest ones? Also what are you using UT3 or GOW?
Have you tried making a new test level to see if maybe your level that you are working on is corrupted it could be that. I would make a small room add terrain and then add lots of layers to it and see if you get the same thing to happen.
Ok good call...
I have been using the same file over and over, shrinking and expanding the x / y num-patch values from 256 down to 64 and back up to test this out. I think you are right, perhaps ill start fresh... perhaps reimport the textures as well. new bugs are cropping up with the layer textures displaying the wrong material now...
All my materials are made of .tga format textures if thats an issue, i dont know... it looks like they are compressed to something else tho
I just built this rig, however I did use the driver it came with on the cd, i kinda blew it off like this is a new card so not many issues...rookie mistake.... im getting the new driver now... thanks.
be back in an hour... or so lol
deleted all level files and material / texture packages
imported all textures again, created new materials (diffuse only)...
created new terrain, with default properties except tesselation max set to 8 and patch size 64x64. no lights, no other mesh, just the terrain and the red builder brush in the scene.
Could add 4 material but in the terrain editing window, no more than 4 was aloud. Added one more material in that package terrain creates then added that layer and texture to the editing window by selecting it and using the "add selection to window" button on the editor window. It works, 5 layers appear with their correct textures....so then I paint a stroke... but before anything appears other than the default texture
CRASH! -
I can live with 4 materials, its not end of the world - the only thing that bothers me is that somewhere out there.. behind the diamond encrusted door of UE3 enlightenment, someone else is using 5! GAH! GAH! ack! cough! splat.
Ued3 pretty much hates vista Aero, or so it would appear. Although not totally fixing the problem, it helped a lot with crashiness when aero was off.
Ued3 terrain will not behave well unless all packages you are going to use are loaded first. This must be a no-brainer for some, but I thought I could load a package after loading a level. Sometimes the textures would pop in - sometimes it would crash if you load mat packs after the level.
No matter what I did, after the first time I created all the terrain material layers, if the number exceeded 4, it would 100% of the time crash when I tried to paint the first material. No stopping this for me.
if I load all the Terrain material layers and attach all their terrain textures.
Save level, save material pack then exit the editor, restart it >load material pack first from generic browser > Load Level >Paint, it worked.
I was able to get 7 materials mixing on the terrain this way. If I added a new package (UN_Sky - for the skyboxes) to the browser, crash... then I restart the editor and add that package first, then load the level, everything was fine. So whenever I want a new package added to the browser I must exit the editor first after saving and load every package again first then continue.
Does anyone know if this is common, that all packages must be loaded before you load a level otherwise its risky?
Thanks billy for the help, I am doing more testing here, see how far I can now push the complexity of the materials. I wont post again I guess since I got it working somewhat, but if your reading this and have any information or used Ued3 Terrain a lot, lets chat for a bit please... thanks.
Humm these are all quite strange errors that you are getting as I know that this should work for you as its not that complex.
I use UT3 editor at home and the GOW editor and I have never run into this problem where after my map is open and I load a package I get a crash. Have you tried to delete your .ini files in your config folder. I think that this is where they are at I am at work now and I cant remeber where exactly where thet are but sometimes when I have issuse I delete these files and then re-open the editor. If you dont have these files when you laucnh the editor unreal will make a fresh version of them for you. Something in there might be causing the issue also do you get any type of error on your crash or better yet a log you can post?
I found the config folder, there are some .xml files in there as well, do you trash all the files or just the .ini's?
Anyway, I have another question since I have your ear - I want to pull out, or even just view the UV's for the skybox static mesh objects. This way I can map my own images to them. Is this possible?
Just the .ini not the XML ones.
Do you mean exporting out of Unreal for use in 3ds Max? If that is what you want to do and my gut is telling me you do I am sorry to say that you cant. Epic does not allow you to export mesh out of packages any more(well in the retail editor anyway I am sure you can do it in the legit version). I remember hearing from someone at work that some took a GOW code drop and took all the meshes, textures, and characters exported them out tweaked them just a bit and put them into another game. So after that Epic took the ability to export anything back out of the engine.
Now there are some things that you can do to get around this.
1: Get 3Ds Max or any other 3D program and learn how to model this and just make your own. (I am totally not trying to be mean I am just letting you know what your options are.)
2: If you are just wanting to move the UV's around a bit you could do it Via the material editor with a pan command and some tweaking.
3: There is this program out there that at run time will capture and save everything that is on your graphis card to a file that you can then open in a 3D program or in Photoshop. But the name of the program tottaly eludes me right now. Ahh I know what it is I just cant think of it. I know I will think of it or maybe someone else knows what I am talking about and can chime in.
1) Everytime I want to delete a mesh/material/texture from one of my packages that I make myself, it keeps telling me something about it's references. Like say I want to remove a mesh, even though I try to delete every single instance of the mesh in the scene, it'll still say it's linked somewhere and won't let me delete it. How do I completely unlink something I want to delete?
2) How do I move something into a group after I've imported it? Like say I imported a mesh into the main package folder, but later on, I made a "Mesh" folder in my package and I want to move the mesh into that folder.
IE: If you want to delete a texture you have imported into a package, make sure its not referenced in a material you have. then also keep your level saved as well, after you remove the references. This will free the item to be removed.
To move an item from folder to folder or UPK to UPK, you have to rename it. Just change the folder/UPK name. Keep in mind that you still need to keep the originating UPK/folder as it redirects Unreal to the new UPK/folder. If an item is there of the same name (no matter what it is), it will get overwriten.
So as soon as you rename save the originating UPK first, then the new UPK. If UnrealED crashes and you didn't save the originating UPK, but you did save the new one, you're in for a world of hurt.
I have a quick question:
basically as everyone knows when you import your textures in ue3 it compresses them and you lose alot of detail, is there anyway i could get around this issue with a hack of some sort.
I've asked this too and the only thing I've found to combat this is to set the LODbias in a textures setting to a negative value. If it's set to zero, then it automatically changes the textures resolution to a certain degree depending on it's LODgroup. So your 1024 is getting resized to 512 if it's in the default world lod group and LODbias is zero. So setting it to -1, will keep it at 1024. and -2 if your texture is 2048, and so on. This is how I understand it at least, and it's suppose to be kept at zero if its intended for play, but setting it to a negative is suppose to be fine for portfolio stuff since you're just showing it off anyways
Hey man, there were 13 ini files in the config folder, when I delete all of them (except DefaultEngine!) it does ask if I want to renew (the ini files are "outdated" in the error message) a bunch of ini's so I accept, however now that I did some testing inside engine (appears to act exactly the same way) and shutdown safely... those 12 ini files I removed, have not been recreated.
The editor is asking me if I want to renew the ini files everytime I restart...
beside all this, the same layering problem is happing, so im just going to restore those files I removed I guess...
EDIT: Another Terrain Error I am seeing follows: I have 8 layers of materials in my terrain editor now, trying to push is a bit further, and found that unless I paint in all four corners of the terrain mesh with the last material in the layer stack (the literal bottom layer) none of the other materials above will appear. I can then go back and remove that last material once the whole stack of layers kind of pops into place on the terrain... I wish I was making this up...
Ah this is another one of those Unreal bugs that happens only when you do not have good UPK work flow and a solid naming convention going into the project.
When you put something in a package unreal keeps a running total of what items have been in that pack this includes if the item has been "Deleted". I have run into errors where i deleted something from the package to find that I can not re-import that object because its name is in use.
To complicate matters even further if you link from one package to another unreal keeps track of that and down the road if you want to take something out you often find that you cant because of this cross package referencing.
AFAIK there is not "Fix" for this but as one guy in here said already you should have some sort of naming game plan for naming your custom assets. This is also good practice if you are trying to get a job in the game industry. I can't tell you mad it makes me when files don't follow the correct naming convention. -D and _D are not the same and when dealing with lots of files little mistakes like this can mess up the way the assets are displayed and grouped together in Unreal, Explorer, and Perforce.
If this is the case I assume packages are rebuilt a lot?