Well, it kinda makes sense. Another user had the same problem with a car I believe. Same as a characters hair is a separate sheet usually (look at the GoW main characters). You don't wanna tag your entire mesh a blended alpha when it doesn't need to be.
Just copy your package and map files over to the November build's directory structure and open the package(s) in the content browser then open the map with the editor.
Why not use the newer January build?
EDIT:
Never mind read fail on my part :poly136:
Why are you going backwards?
EDIT2:
Just tried to open some January build stuff with the December build, that was a total fail.
Perhaps the package file could be opened in a hex editor or something so you could change the "PackageVersion" value, that might work. Though if you are using anything December build specific then it would be broken in the November build, and most likely crash the editor.
My January map just crashed the December editor so I'm not sure if there is any way around that.
open the texture, set the LODBias to -1. This will force the highest mip.
import as uncompressed (though, when you save, the engine compresses the textures)
Also, be sure to set the LOD group of the texture properly. If it is set to world, it will get downsized to 1024 or 512, and in worst cases 256. You can set it to the UI group for viewing purposes, but the character & vehicle group should work best.
im having the a similar problem, i did tried what you suggested with the diffuse/normal it increased the distance a bit but its still ridiculously blurred at a distance were it should be full LOD
so ksybox fixes it? then its not a but, its a feature, its the settings for the texturegroups, you want to have it different, change it in the ini or use another texturegroup
kk,
another question i wanna have the feeling of a puddle and it draining towards the drain, my first thought was to alpha the whole thing out and use a lerp in the material, but im not sure how to create the reflection for the water/puddle? is there a tutorial for this? or can anyone give me the jest of it?,
It's better practice to pad background colours with average colours of your diffuse anyway, if not for opacity, then to allow for errors when the engine scales through different resolutions of your image. White/black lines are evident, generic colours in keeping with the scheme of the texture are not.
So, I'm confused. In the unreal tournament 3 editor "tiledshot 2" would make a really high res screenshot. In the new UDK, I can get a screenshot, but not at a super high resolution like the tiledshot command does. The command for it does not seem to work. Did they change the command, or did they take it out?
i have a question. I am currently unwrapping a building that i plan to place in a very small scene. Its a small corner diner. For the parts that are glass, how do i make them use one of the reflective glass shaders in unreal? Should i just delete the glass from the model then create planes in unreal and put them in place, or make them a separate object then import?
1. Apply two materials to your diner one for the building and one for the glass. Import it into Unreal as one object, then apply the glass material to the glass and the building material to the building.
2. Separate the glass polygons from your diner and import them as a 2nd object. Then inside Unreal apply one material to your building mesh and another material to your glass mesh.
Note however that you probably should get some practice constructing in a modular fashion by slicing that building up into modular chunks (wall section, awning section, door, etc...) and rebuild it in Unreal from the different parts.
It is modular already, i was just gonna put everything on 1 uv map. Best approach is probably a 2nd material, how do i do that in max? set it to a diif uv channel? never understood how to
Vinegar, the dominant directional lights do not support transparency since they use signed distance fields for their shadows. Regular directional lights support transparency and area light shadows but do not have the dynamic specular or sharper shadows.
Cheers for the reply. I figured out what was wrong and feel like the biggest Noob in Noobington right now.
I thought, when you went into the actor classes and expanded the directional light that it was only the two WITHIN the actor that were available, ie: the dominant and directional ones. Didn't realise that the root light -the regular old directional light was even an option... boy, is my face red.
:poly102::poly102::poly102:
Still, it's just another step along the road of experience I guess.
anyone know a good tutorial for deco layers, Say i have a texture on a wall and I want to add a stain, that what im looking to do but i dont know what to search for. Thanks guys
Or vertex blend between a dirty texture and a clean one, check out this awesome tutorial by Lamont in this post, he also goes over an alternative to decals near the bottom of the post.
You might also want to check out The Snow and Ice of Uncharted2? thread for more advanced texture blending using vertex color + heightmaps to achieve more control over where textures blend with each other. shadows made a material based on those concepts.
Chris Albeluhn has yet another method for this kind of thing. Check out his tutorial here.
Hey guys, I have started learning UDK a few days ago and I'm currently in the process of exporting my models. However, no matter what I do, I can't achieve the same level of quality as in Xnormal, or CE2.
Here's the comparison:
As you can see my normal maps in UDK look washed out - although turning on SRGB setting helped a little bit.
Could it be caused by UDK's lightmap baking solution? I have noticed that my normal maps are stronger with dynamic shadows.
Also, there are some strange shading errors on the sides of the model, they were even worse before I installed the most recent version of UDK though.
Furthermore, the normal map doesn't seem to fully compensate the hard edges on the model. I have assigned each UV shell to a different smoothing group in order to make sure that my normal maps bake properly. It works fine in both Xnormal and CE2 but not in UDK. Then again, it's only clearly visible ingame and not so obvious when usijng tiledshot.
The normal maps are very "splotchy" until I turn Defer Compression on. It seems that it's a common issue; however, after I save my assets this setting resets itself.
So my question is; is it possible to achieve better quality? Or should I just suck it up?
I've seen some really high-quality content done in UDK and that leads me to think that I'm just doing something wrong. I've tried flipping out the channels, different compression presets and played around with lighting setups. Yet nothing seems to work.
Could it be my material setup? I have simply connected my normal map to the Normal node; vanilla UDK materials are slightly more complex.
Sorry for the wall of text, but any advice will be appreciated.
Tea: Have you tried multiplying you're normal map with a Vector? I usually multiply the normal map with a vector3 of 1.7, 1.7, and .3 (This multiplies the red and green by 1.7 and the blue by .3, some people get rid of the blue altogether, but I think it looks a little odd). This seems to deepen the map a bit.
Vinegar Strokes:
Thanks for the reply. I've flipped them out one more time to be sure. Green channel is fine I'm afraid and Xnormal is set to x+ y- z+
DarthNater:
Cheers. I've tested it out; while it does make the normal map stronger, seams on hard edges are more visible as well.
I will look into my smoothing groups, perhaps they are screwed up.
I will try to post them later on. Thanks. Keep in mind however, that the edge on the main section (1 smoothing group) is fine, whereas top of the pillar (each uvshell has a different smoothing group appliedd) has a hard edge problem.
When doing a lerp with lots of fuzziness in the mask edges, anyone know any tricks for making the edges less fuzzy and getting a better transition between the two textures? Was about to hunt around in existing UDK textures for ideas but if anyone knows of an existing tutorial or some cool tricks that'd be great!
Would still love to see an actual material setup. Confident i can pull this off with some experimentation, but it'd be great to see an actual setup. I'm also planning on animating the blend to give it a "sand blowing in the wind" effect that will constantly change the look of the sand over time.
is there any way of turning off the flickering shadows besides using unlit mode in udk? my shadows in airborn are flickering like hell, i'm getting eppileptic with this and it's no joke last time i tried working with this it was hard not to puke after and hour of flickering... now i just set it to unlit but seriously getting it back to the way it was with ut3 would be awesome
Is it easier(or better) to Model the whole scene (building, props, terrian) on Maya/3Ds Max and then import to Unreal Engine? Or Model them all in seperate files, import and build an unreal scene with all your Models?
For a portfolio environment you can do it either way.
However when building a level "for real" you would want to use static mesh instancing for all it's worth.
In which case you would assemble the level in Unreal out of modular parts that snap/fit together easily using Unreal's power of 2 grid snapping system.
You don't need to make all of your objects in separate files, just make sure they are separate objects/meshes.
In fact it's probably a good idea to construct sets of items that you intend to fit together and/or share the same texture in the same file.
Also once you start to assemble your level be sure to keep each object's pivot in the same place as you work, that way you can re-import/replace old versions without having to re-position them in Unreal.
Cool thanks Ben. Will use the Static mesh instancing in Unreal as you mention. Good practice on doing it the right way. Hehe I am trying to learn the Unreal 3 software, rather than rendering on Maya/3ds max. Thanks again
is anyone else having problems with the lens flare actors? the original UDK they worked fine, now none of the lens flares show up at all in my scene. Does anyone have an idea why this is? I cant find any answers i'm not sure if its me or if its UDK.
try replacing the lens flare nodes in your material with occlusion percentage node (I think thats the new name) I believe a change went in that broke the old nodes
Replies
Is there any way to do this or is my only option to rebuild the file completely within the November build?
Why not use the newer January build?
EDIT:
Never mind read fail on my part :poly136:
Why are you going backwards?
EDIT2:
Just tried to open some January build stuff with the December build, that was a total fail.
Perhaps the package file could be opened in a hex editor or something so you could change the "PackageVersion" value, that might work. Though if you are using anything December build specific then it would be broken in the November build, and most likely crash the editor.
My January map just crashed the December editor so I'm not sure if there is any way around that.
Oh well, good luck.
TEXTUREGROUP_World=(MinLODSize=256,MaxLODSize=1024,LODBias=1)
TEXTUREGROUP_WorldNormalMap=(MinLODSize=256,MaxLODSize=1024,LODBias=1)
TEXTUREGROUP_WorldSpecular=(MinLODSize=256,MaxLODSize=1024,LODBias=1)
TEXTUREGROUP_Character=(MinLODSize=256,MaxLODSize=1024,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_CharacterNormalMap=(MinLODSize=256,MaxLODSize=1024,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_CharacterSpecular=(MinLODSize=256,MaxLODSize=1024,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_Weapon=(MinLODSize=256,MaxLODSize=1024,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_WeaponNormalMap=(MinLODSize=256,MaxLODSize=1024,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_WeaponSpecular=(MinLODSize=256,MaxLODSize=1024,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_Vehicle=(MinLODSize=512,MaxLODSize=1024,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_VehicleNormalMap=(MinLODSize=512,MaxLODSize=1024,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_VehicleSpecular=(MinLODSize=512,MaxLODSize=1024,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_Cinematic=(MinLODSize=256,MaxLODSize=4096,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_Effects=(MinLODSize=128,MaxLODSize=512,LODBias=1)
TEXTUREGROUP_Skybox=(MinLODSize=512,MaxLODSize=2048,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_UI=(MinLODSize=512,MaxLODSize=1024,LODBias=1)
TEXTUREGROUP_LightAndShadowMap=(MinLODSize=512,MaxLODSize=4096,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_RenderTarget=(MinLODSize=1,MaxLODSize=4096,LODBias=0)
You can change the settings in Engine.ini.
open the texture, set the LODBias to -1. This will force the highest mip.
import as uncompressed (though, when you save, the engine compresses the textures)
Also, be sure to set the LOD group of the texture properly. If it is set to world, it will get downsized to 1024 or 512, and in worst cases 256. You can set it to the UI group for viewing purposes, but the character & vehicle group should work best.
another question i wanna have the feeling of a puddle and it draining towards the drain, my first thought was to alpha the whole thing out and use a lerp in the material, but im not sure how to create the reflection for the water/puddle? is there a tutorial for this? or can anyone give me the jest of it?,
How do I make a green background colour?
If you don't have it in a PS file, make one.
It's better practice to pad background colours with average colours of your diffuse anyway, if not for opacity, then to allow for errors when the engine scales through different resolutions of your image. White/black lines are evident, generic colours in keeping with the scheme of the texture are not.
I'm having some troubles trying to get directional lights to cast translucent shadows. Basically, I can't. Point lights however work just dandy.
Check it
Whereas if I use a point light:
Am I missing something obvious here or is it simply a limitation of the directional lights in Unreal? Ta la!
edit; nevermind, fixed it.
There are two approaches to this.
1. Apply two materials to your diner one for the building and one for the glass. Import it into Unreal as one object, then apply the glass material to the glass and the building material to the building.
2. Separate the glass polygons from your diner and import them as a 2nd object. Then inside Unreal apply one material to your building mesh and another material to your glass mesh.
Note however that you probably should get some practice constructing in a modular fashion by slicing that building up into modular chunks (wall section, awning section, door, etc...) and rebuild it in Unreal from the different parts.
Check out the Environment Modeling FAQ & Resources MEGATHREAD for more info on Modular Design.
Create two materials, one for the glass one for the building.
Be sure to put at least one texture in one of the materials slots (diffuse works fine) for both materials otherwise it won't export properly.
Create a multi sub matarial with two sub materials.
Assign the two materials you created earlier to your multi sub material.
Apply your multi sub material to your object.
Then select your object's edit poly modifier and scroll down to the material IDs section.
Select the glass polygons and assign them the same material ID that you gave the glass material in the multi sub material.
Select inverse and assign the other material ID to the rest of the building.
Then export as a ASE file.
Hopefully I didn't forget anything.
that sounds right, ive used multisub materials like this before just forgot about it lol. Thanks
New UDK game, Dungeon Defense, just released:
http://www.udk.com/showcase-dungeon-defense.html
Just found this on the UDK group on LinkedIn.
I thought, when you went into the actor classes and expanded the directional light that it was only the two WITHIN the actor that were available, ie: the dominant and directional ones. Didn't realise that the root light -the regular old directional light was even an option... boy, is my face red.
:poly102::poly102::poly102:
Still, it's just another step along the road of experience I guess.
Or vertex blend between a dirty texture and a clean one, check out this awesome tutorial by Lamont in this post, he also goes over an alternative to decals near the bottom of the post.
Lamont: that was a great tutorial btw.
You might also want to check out The Snow and Ice of Uncharted2? thread for more advanced texture blending using vertex color + heightmaps to achieve more control over where textures blend with each other. shadows made a material based on those concepts.
Chris Albeluhn has yet another method for this kind of thing. Check out his tutorial here.
Here's the comparison:
As you can see my normal maps in UDK look washed out - although turning on SRGB setting helped a little bit.
Could it be caused by UDK's lightmap baking solution? I have noticed that my normal maps are stronger with dynamic shadows.
Also, there are some strange shading errors on the sides of the model, they were even worse before I installed the most recent version of UDK though.
Furthermore, the normal map doesn't seem to fully compensate the hard edges on the model. I have assigned each UV shell to a different smoothing group in order to make sure that my normal maps bake properly. It works fine in both Xnormal and CE2 but not in UDK. Then again, it's only clearly visible ingame and not so obvious when usijng tiledshot.
The normal maps are very "splotchy" until I turn Defer Compression on. It seems that it's a common issue; however, after I save my assets this setting resets itself.
So my question is; is it possible to achieve better quality? Or should I just suck it up?
I've seen some really high-quality content done in UDK and that leads me to think that I'm just doing something wrong. I've tried flipping out the channels, different compression presets and played around with lighting setups. Yet nothing seems to work.
Could it be my material setup? I have simply connected my normal map to the Normal node; vanilla UDK materials are slightly more complex.
Sorry for the wall of text, but any advice will be appreciated.
Thanks for the reply. I've flipped them out one more time to be sure. Green channel is fine I'm afraid and Xnormal is set to x+ y- z+
DarthNater:
Cheers. I've tested it out; while it does make the normal map stronger, seams on hard edges are more visible as well.
I will look into my smoothing groups, perhaps they are screwed up.
The wires are pretty straightforward.
Max:
Triangulated in UDK:
Edit: Found a bit of help in one of the threads here involving comparing height maps against vertex blending, here's a video showing it off:
[ame]
Would still love to see an actual material setup. Confident i can pull this off with some experimentation, but it'd be great to see an actual setup. I'm also planning on animating the blend to give it a "sand blowing in the wind" effect that will constantly change the look of the sand over time.
shadows made this material, you can download a upk of it from the thread.
Thanks for the heads up ben, and of course to shadows as well!
For a portfolio environment you can do it either way.
However when building a level "for real" you would want to use static mesh instancing for all it's worth.
In which case you would assemble the level in Unreal out of modular parts that snap/fit together easily using Unreal's power of 2 grid snapping system.
You don't need to make all of your objects in separate files, just make sure they are separate objects/meshes.
In fact it's probably a good idea to construct sets of items that you intend to fit together and/or share the same texture in the same file.
Also once you start to assemble your level be sure to keep each object's pivot in the same place as you work, that way you can re-import/replace old versions without having to re-position them in Unreal.