Hey guys, I have a question regarding either lighting or normals in UDK. Attached is a pic of what I'm dealing with. I have a nifty little material that simulates shallow standing water. As you can see if I look at it from one angle, the effect comes through. However, if I look at it from the other angle, it vanishes. It seems like I have to be facing one way in my level for this stuff to show up.
The floor normal map here was done in Nvidia's PS plugin. Nothin fancy goin goin in the material, just a constant 3 to boost the normal map, some specular tweaking etc.
The lights vary between point, armor or spotlights and they all seem to render these results in game.
I've been messing with a technique of NOT using a base texture for my rocks in such a predominant way. So I'd paint in my tones, in the current project I am using cool colors (usually two slightly similar colors top to bottom or front to back, just to give tonal variations), then I go in with hot/"tingy" colors and use the cavity painting in ZB. From there I use an image to add more color variation. But really slight, even that's set for cavity. Then to get natural glowing in the cracks, I tweak my cavity painting again and go over it. Finally I go in on the highest levels and add highlights. And by highest level I mean the most dominant surface peaks to make the edges look natural.
I have a page bookmarked that details the kinds of rock formations that occur in the world and why. This helped me a lot, as they had simple line drawings of the rock formation flow. Then I have a folder of different rocks from those kinds of formations and use those as reference, and come up with a structure of my own. I also noticed there is such a thing as "too much detail" for your normal maps when it comes to rocks. You won't see the detail and time you put into making it on these structures.
@armadreaus Sounds to me, if i'm hearing him right, that his material just needs a bump offset.
And yeah, none of those tutorials seem to be what i'm looking for. I'm going to keep taking a look through them though because maybe something I learn there will help me figure out how to do it myself.
Bump offset eh, could someone perhaps explain how to go about this? From what I gather this is an issue with the normal maps only baking for one direction somehow. New to me.
It's still unfinished and probably a bit subtle for showing off right now, but this is a shot of exactly the issue at hand. You can see where the spotlight is hitting, the effect is gone, but it's showing up there on the right side. I don't have any weird lights facing some extreme direction that'd be causing it.
I'm with JordanW. Even in the new pic you posted, I can't tell that there's water there to begin with. It's so subtle that we can't see it at all, lol. It just looks like you have an intensely bumped up normal map on the right. This may help: http://www.hourences.com/book/tutorialsue3water2.htm
Is it possible to use custom lightmaps in UDK? I'm just getting started with it, and I have assets that have hard edges in the model that are cancelled out by the normal map so that they are smooth for the final. However when baking lightmaps in UDK those hard edges get picked up again and it looks pretty crappy.
There are 3 techniques I can think of to work around this issue, but I don't know how to do any of them in UDK or which ones are even possible, so any suggestions are appreciated.
Method 1: Import in a high resolution model (500k tris) to bake the LM onto the low poly. I don't know if this is possible in UDK, I've done it in xNormal.
Method 2: Import a custom lightmap (from xnormal) and replace the UDK created lightmap. I don't know if this can be user replaced.
Method 3: Disable lightmaps on the object and plug a custom lightmap into a channel on the shader to use the 2nd uv set to fake the lightmap. I know this is possible (though the least desirable way), but I don't know which channel to plug it into or how to make it use the 2nd uv set, or how to disable lightmaps.
you just need to lightmap UV properly.
split your lightmap only by smoothing groups if possible, that way you wont get a lighting seam which looks like a hard edge.
I'm a little lost with what you mean by lightmap. Could you describe it at all?
As you have said, when you want hard edge lighting on your models break the light map UVs apart where your models have hard edges and be sure to add enough padding.
When you want smooth continuous lighting on your models remove as many seams from your light map UVs as you can. You would be surprised at how much distortion you can get away with light map UVs and still get a nice clean light map bake in UDK.
@gannonroader: It sounds like you're on the right track with this bump offset idea. I'm attaching a pic of the water effect.
The thing is, right now it doesn't really matter how the effect looks cuz it's so early in the game as far as the level is concerned. Basically my point is, my normals show up from one angle in the game/editor and from the other angle, they don't.
Here's what the material node for that faked standing water looks like.
This is a better example of what's happening. Myself and another artist have been going over and over this on 2 machines, both running the newest UDK with the same results. I'm using an ATI Radeon, he's using an Nvidia, both new within the last 6 months or so.
You'll see in these 2 shots a wall with a very pronounced and ugly texture on it. This is to show the exact issue at hand more clearly.
What's happening is, as I rotate the camera from angle A to angle B, the normals slowly dissipate and ultimately disappear. More precisely, as I see it, it's going from showing normals/spec etc to showing diffuse only at the second angle.
We've checked the normal maps, they check out. These two shots are using 1 default point light in the scene. This problem occurs no matter what material setup we use, including simple hookups of D/S/N maps.
it's because your water effect is largly based on the specular being shown to convey that there's water on the surface. From the opposite angle you see no specular therefor no more water.
You should use a reflection combined with some darkening at glazing angles to give the appearance of water on the surface.
its not just that jordan, i was messing with his files earlier as well, and it happens to every singe normal map on every material on every object. What was strange is i started a new scene loaded his working package and made some objects to test his materials and they work just fine. But then as soon as you build lighting the whole thing breaks. What starts happening is the normal map only appears to work from one direction and as you rotate the camera to another direction they begin to disappear. its definitely not normal behavior ive never seen anything like it before.
This is in the newest version of UDK from april, so im curious if anyone else gets this issue, i think hes trying this out in a previous version of UDK, but there has to be something that is causing this, that can be solved, although it is pretty weird.
Hijak is correct. I ran a quick test in UE3 just to see if I was insane and there it works just fine after baking. It's something other than the normal maps.
I pulled a noob ass move when importing them and just imported them with default settings, TC_Default to be specific. I realized this after the fact and changed all the normal maps to TC_normalmap, so what you see in the shots is TC_normalmap compression. Just to test I tried the normal map with no compression and it still does the same thing.
Dude, Jordan, I could kiss you :poly142: So I changed it to no compression and did what you instructed, these are the results I got. At the very least, it's far more predictable in how it's displaying and I think I can roll with this now!
Since I'm obviously still learning about how unreal processes normal maps, could you explain a little about your solution? I'd like to understand it as thoroughly as possible. From what I gather, changing that min range to -1 allows it to push the range in so it's viewable from all angles.
I also wanted to be sure that by 'setting -1 on all RGB channels', you're referring to the 'UnpackMin' under SRGB. There's a 0,1,2,3 column, and I'm setting all of those to -1 instead of 0, yes?
yeah, this isnt really specific to UE3 and if you set your compression type to TC_Normal map on import it will do this automatically. The reason it does this is textures go from 0-255 but normal maps represent a vector in each axis, and the vector can go from -1 to 1 so you have to unpack those channels(Axis) from 0-1 (0-255) to -1 to 1. If you dont do that it thinks the normals are only positive.
yeah, this isnt really specific to UE3 and if you set your compression type to TC_Normal map on import it will do this automatically. The reason it does this is textures go from 0-255 but normal maps represent a vector in each axis, and the vector can go from -1 to 1 so you have to unpack those channels(Axis) from 0-1 (0-255) to -1 to 1. If you dont do that it thinks the normals are only positive.
thanks for the info, it was strange i was getting the same issue even when importing as tc_normal map. For some reason i had to manually go in and edit the srgb values , but at least know i know to look out for that, had never experienced that issue in UE3 so i guess it is something to watch for in UDK. Was this something you discovered through trail and error or somewhere out there was there a resource that talked abou this, because hours of googling yeilded very little on this subject. thanks again.
Yes indeed, thanks again for your help. This is why having a great community like PC is important. You saved me from some headaches, thanks man!:poly121:
Check out this post and the link there on how to set up a camera in your level with kismet.
Once you've got that done it's as simple as selecting the camera actor bringing up it's properties then you can change the FOV angle and the Aspect Ratio.
Hello guys. Is it possible to change FOV in the editor? And where would I go to change it? Thanks.
In editor? Or do you mean in game/PIE? You can have separate views for each. In editor is in ini file only as it's global. In Game/Pie is what Ben A. said. Or change the default pawn file to the FOV you want.
Im trying to wrap my head around this. Bicycle Vehicle. Any examples out there? How are the animations and IK mixed for the pedals and handlebars?
Like I assume I make a static sitting pose. Then make a kismet script that takes that and moves the arms to match up the hands to the handlebars and feet to pedals.
Is it with adding sockets to the toe bones? And another socket to the wheel where the pedal is? Or pure bone to bone alone? If even I can do IK movement from wheel spin and rotation.
I cant "tell" the engine how far a certain bone can move on a character I assume? Only through the physics ragdoll. So how would I stop it from say making the leg swing backwords? Or if I have the initial animation in a somewhat crouched position so the arms and legs are already bent in the right direction, the IK would use the angle they are already at.
Would I be looking at combinging the physics ragdoll with the character? So that the main body keeps its animation pose, but the arms and legs go ragdoll and are constrainted to the bone of the wheel/bars? Or you cant attach part of a physics ragdoll to bones?
So, I'm having problems with using speedtrees in UDK, much like most other people. I have alot of them in my map, and when I try to build with lightmass, it tells me that the build failed. I turned off "receive lights" on half of my trees, and it built fine, so I'm assuming that the way my trees are being lit is the problem. I'm using a dominant directional light as this is an outdoor environment, and it seems to work for a certain number of trees, but when the tree count gets too high, it makes the build not work. Most of the trees are in the background and the player can't get to them, so they don't have to look phenomenal, just give the illusion that they are there in the background. Maybe there's a different lighting setup that I can use that will work, or maybe using meshes as leaves instead of billboards will work better? I've heard that you can do that, but I can't find anything on how to actually go about making meshes for the leaves. If anyone could help me understand this better, I would greatly appreciate it.
I just imported a mesh from modo to udk, setup my material, got it looking how i want, i do a light bake and everything bakes fine except my static mesh (from modo) i realized i tried this a few months ago and i also got the same results. my mesh just shows up black while everything else has light maps baked on it. i goggled a fix for this but cant find anything, no idea whats going on. any ideas?
also, my texture size is 2k seems incredibly low res in udk, is there something i can do so it doesn't...down res it? not sure whats happening but it doesn't look good when i'm looking around in the mesh preview.
sorry, quite new to udk still. any help be really appreciated.
I'm new to Unrealscript and don't worry I'm not thinking "here you write this code for me". Can someone point me in the right direction on how to create a custom user interface that could be seen in-game?
For example the action-bars you see in WoW
I know how to use and write mutators in the UIScene editor but this doesn't seem to work well with in-game interfaces.
Are you exporting your meshes with a 2nd UV set made specificaly for light maps baking? If you need more info about that check out this post. Are your static meshes set up properly to build light maps on? Check this post.
If you are using the ASE export script from this site in Modo you have to name your UV maps properly. "UV1", "UV2", "UV3" otherwise it won't export them at all.
About the low res textures:
Double click the texture in the asset browser then scroll down to the LODGroup setting. Change that to something else that supports a higher texture resolution like TEXTUREGROUP_RenderTarget.
I was looking at the GDC 2010 map just now, anyone know how they did the moss being unique to all those meshes? is that just a LERP node or are they painting something?
It reminds me of uncharted 2 where nearly every object looks unique texture wise. i heard they would use 2 textures and used a vertex paint channel to drive where one texture overlapped on top of the other or something?
just curious if anyone knows how to do either the moss on those objects or something similar to uncharted 2 where you can paint where you'd like one texture to show i guess? sorry if i'm so vague on this, hard to explain it since i dont know how they're doing it. thanks for any info as always.
I'm new to Unrealscript and don't worry I'm not thinking "here you write this code for me". Can someone point me in the right direction on how to create a custom user interface that could be seen in-game?
For example the action-bars you see in WoW
I know how to use and write mutators in the UIScene editor but this doesn't seem to work well with in-game interfaces.
Any help would be much appreciated.
I cant help you much except to say you might hold off until May release as they are going from uiscene to scaleform.
The Snow and Ice of Uncharted2? thread should explain the tech behind the moss. shadows made a UE 3 - Shader that should get you started. I believe Virtuosic was also working on a similar shader, not sure if he released it to the community yet. I haven't taken a close look at the new UDK moss shader yet but it's probably similar.
To start a UI in UDK is really simple. There are different types depending on what you want to do, but derive from GameHud and make sure you put YourGame.YourHud in the ini and YouGameInfo.uc.
It's not difficult, just a looooooong process. Nothing you can't do. There are some tuts on the UDN that go over this as well. If you can't find them, post up.
Hey guys thanks for the help. Found the tuts and been trucking away scripting
Scaleform is so awesome too might consider switching once UDK supports it or I guess from that link you would be required to switch from UIScene to Scaleform
Im trying to wrap my head around this. Bicycle Vehicle. Any examples out there? How are the animations and IK mixed for the pedals and handlebars?
Like I assume I make a static sitting pose. Then make a kismet script that takes that and moves the arms to match up the hands to the handlebars and feet to pedals.
Is it with adding sockets to the toe bones? And another socket to the wheel where the pedal is? Or pure bone to bone alone? If even I can do IK movement from wheel spin and rotation.
I cant "tell" the engine how far a certain bone can move on a character I assume? Only through the physics ragdoll. So how would I stop it from say making the leg swing backwords? Or if I have the initial animation in a somewhat crouched position so the arms and legs are already bent in the right direction, the IK would use the angle they are already at.
Would I be looking at combinging the physics ragdoll with the character? So that the main body keeps its animation pose, but the arms and legs go ragdoll and are constrainted to the bone of the wheel/bars? Or you cant attach part of a physics ragdoll to bones?
You're trying to rig up a bicycle? First thought would be to animate the character on the bike riding it. Take a look at the hoverboard animations on the board itself and the character. You need to make a tree just for riding the bike. Forwards, backwards all animations should be done with the character on the bike, then you'd export both from whatever app you did the animations in.
Hey guys, another newbie question here. When I enable the gameview mode, the texture quality of my imported static mesh seems to downsize a bit and looks blurred. Is there a setting to change it? Thanks.
Your trying to sync the animation to the wheel movement in game. Because the pedals are on the bicycle, and the movement distance/rollout is based on engine setup. In other words. they are not on the character. Same for the steering. You would have the wheels and pedals and handle bars not aligning with the characters animation exactly. The feet would be going faster or slower than the wheel movement and running through the pedals while the hands would not match the speed of the turning.
Then you would have to have "roll up" animation, then braking. And have those smoothly integrate into the morphs. The morphs I dont believe are meant to inbetween that sort of circular movement.
Not only this, but what happens if someone uses a analog JS? Then your dealing with degrees of speed.
Quickie not related to the above. Is this doable with UT3? I mean if I put the sides off the layout space then bake, will udk smoothly transition? Or is it only meant to mirror in one direction?
I did try google, but didn't get exactly the answer I was looking for.
Hey all, I'm wondering if theres any way to set up a material to fake the metallic reflections for game characters in UDK. Like, whats the best way to create a polished armor look for steel pieces? Any suggestions would be appreciated.
If i change the compression settings on a texture, do i have to reimport it?
I just noticed that I don´t have tc_normalmap on my normalmaps and figured i should change that. Dont know if anything will improve or change if i do but eh. It´s there for a reason i guess.
When i change the normalmap compression the texture changes to a darker blue, doesnt feel all that right
Doesnt look weird in the editor though. Also. Got any good suggestions for getting sharper textures in udk? Seems like the diffuse is getting blurry. Texturegroup skybox, lodbias -1 is what i do now. Anything else?
Replies
The floor normal map here was done in Nvidia's PS plugin. Nothin fancy goin goin in the material, just a constant 3 to boost the normal map, some specular tweaking etc.
The lights vary between point, armor or spotlights and they all seem to render these results in game.
Any thoughts?
I have a page bookmarked that details the kinds of rock formations that occur in the world and why. This helped me a lot, as they had simple line drawings of the rock formation flow. Then I have a folder of different rocks from those kinds of formations and use those as reference, and come up with a structure of my own. I also noticed there is such a thing as "too much detail" for your normal maps when it comes to rocks. You won't see the detail and time you put into making it on these structures.
And yeah, none of those tutorials seem to be what i'm looking for. I'm going to keep taking a look through them though because maybe something I learn there will help me figure out how to do it myself.
There are 3 techniques I can think of to work around this issue, but I don't know how to do any of them in UDK or which ones are even possible, so any suggestions are appreciated.
Method 1: Import in a high resolution model (500k tris) to bake the LM onto the low poly. I don't know if this is possible in UDK, I've done it in xNormal.
Method 2: Import a custom lightmap (from xnormal) and replace the UDK created lightmap. I don't know if this can be user replaced.
Method 3: Disable lightmaps on the object and plug a custom lightmap into a channel on the shader to use the 2nd uv set to fake the lightmap. I know this is possible (though the least desirable way), but I don't know which channel to plug it into or how to make it use the 2nd uv set, or how to disable lightmaps.
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks
split your lightmap only by smoothing groups if possible, that way you wont get a lighting seam which looks like a hard edge.
I'm a little lost with what you mean by lightmap. Could you describe it at all?
As you have said, when you want hard edge lighting on your models break the light map UVs apart where your models have hard edges and be sure to add enough padding.
When you want smooth continuous lighting on your models remove as many seams from your light map UVs as you can. You would be surprised at how much distortion you can get away with light map UVs and still get a nice clean light map bake in UDK.
But the picture suggest to me also that you might be talking about using a second uv channel for lightmap?
The thing is, right now it doesn't really matter how the effect looks cuz it's so early in the game as far as the level is concerned. Basically my point is, my normals show up from one angle in the game/editor and from the other angle, they don't.
Here's what the material node for that faked standing water looks like.
You'll see in these 2 shots a wall with a very pronounced and ugly texture on it. This is to show the exact issue at hand more clearly.
What's happening is, as I rotate the camera from angle A to angle B, the normals slowly dissipate and ultimately disappear. More precisely, as I see it, it's going from showing normals/spec etc to showing diffuse only at the second angle.
We've checked the normal maps, they check out. These two shots are using 1 default point light in the scene. This problem occurs no matter what material setup we use, including simple hookups of D/S/N maps.
You should use a reflection combined with some darkening at glazing angles to give the appearance of water on the surface.
This is in the newest version of UDK from april, so im curious if anyone else gets this issue, i think hes trying this out in a previous version of UDK, but there has to be something that is causing this, that can be solved, although it is pretty weird.
Since I'm obviously still learning about how unreal processes normal maps, could you explain a little about your solution? I'd like to understand it as thoroughly as possible. From what I gather, changing that min range to -1 allows it to push the range in so it's viewable from all angles.
I also wanted to be sure that by 'setting -1 on all RGB channels', you're referring to the 'UnpackMin' under SRGB. There's a 0,1,2,3 column, and I'm setting all of those to -1 instead of 0, yes?
thanks for the info, it was strange i was getting the same issue even when importing as tc_normal map. For some reason i had to manually go in and edit the srgb values , but at least know i know to look out for that, had never experienced that issue in UE3 so i guess it is something to watch for in UDK. Was this something you discovered through trail and error or somewhere out there was there a resource that talked abou this, because hours of googling yeilded very little on this subject. thanks again.
Check out this post and the link there on how to set up a camera in your level with kismet.
Once you've got that done it's as simple as selecting the camera actor bringing up it's properties then you can change the FOV angle and the Aspect Ratio.
I hope that helps.
Like I assume I make a static sitting pose. Then make a kismet script that takes that and moves the arms to match up the hands to the handlebars and feet to pedals.
Is it with adding sockets to the toe bones? And another socket to the wheel where the pedal is? Or pure bone to bone alone? If even I can do IK movement from wheel spin and rotation.
I cant "tell" the engine how far a certain bone can move on a character I assume? Only through the physics ragdoll. So how would I stop it from say making the leg swing backwords? Or if I have the initial animation in a somewhat crouched position so the arms and legs are already bent in the right direction, the IK would use the angle they are already at.
Would I be looking at combinging the physics ragdoll with the character? So that the main body keeps its animation pose, but the arms and legs go ragdoll and are constrainted to the bone of the wheel/bars? Or you cant attach part of a physics ragdoll to bones?
also, my texture size is 2k seems incredibly low res in udk, is there something i can do so it doesn't...down res it? not sure whats happening but it doesn't look good when i'm looking around in the mesh preview.
sorry, quite new to udk still. any help be really appreciated.
I'm new to Unrealscript and don't worry I'm not thinking "here you write this code for me". Can someone point me in the right direction on how to create a custom user interface that could be seen in-game?
For example the action-bars you see in WoW
I know how to use and write mutators in the UIScene editor but this doesn't seem to work well with in-game interfaces.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Are you exporting your meshes with a 2nd UV set made specificaly for light maps baking? If you need more info about that check out this post. Are your static meshes set up properly to build light maps on? Check this post.
If you are using the ASE export script from this site in Modo you have to name your UV maps properly. "UV1", "UV2", "UV3" otherwise it won't export them at all.
About the low res textures:
Double click the texture in the asset browser then scroll down to the LODGroup setting. Change that to something else that supports a higher texture resolution like TEXTUREGROUP_RenderTarget.
Hope that helps.
It reminds me of uncharted 2 where nearly every object looks unique texture wise. i heard they would use 2 textures and used a vertex paint channel to drive where one texture overlapped on top of the other or something?
just curious if anyone knows how to do either the moss on those objects or something similar to uncharted 2 where you can paint where you'd like one texture to show i guess? sorry if i'm so vague on this, hard to explain it since i dont know how they're doing it. thanks for any info as always.
I cant help you much except to say you might hold off until May release as they are going from uiscene to scaleform.
http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=724791
http://www.scaleform.com/
Maybe start making some designs in a vector program?
The Snow and Ice of Uncharted2? thread should explain the tech behind the moss. shadows made a UE 3 - Shader that should get you started. I believe Virtuosic was also working on a similar shader, not sure if he released it to the community yet. I haven't taken a close look at the new UDK moss shader yet but it's probably similar.
It's not difficult, just a looooooong process. Nothing you can't do. There are some tuts on the UDN that go over this as well. If you can't find them, post up.
Scaleform is so awesome too might consider switching once UDK supports it or I guess from that link you would be required to switch from UIScene to Scaleform
TTT
Much easier, less mess and 100% predictable.
Your trying to sync the animation to the wheel movement in game. Because the pedals are on the bicycle, and the movement distance/rollout is based on engine setup. In other words. they are not on the character. Same for the steering. You would have the wheels and pedals and handle bars not aligning with the characters animation exactly. The feet would be going faster or slower than the wheel movement and running through the pedals while the hands would not match the speed of the turning.
Then you would have to have "roll up" animation, then braking. And have those smoothly integrate into the morphs. The morphs I dont believe are meant to inbetween that sort of circular movement.
Not only this, but what happens if someone uses a analog JS? Then your dealing with degrees of speed.
I did try google, but didn't get exactly the answer I was looking for.
Thanks!
Make sure your mirror seams run vertically in your UV layout and avoid putting the seams on any curved surfaces and you should be fine.
I just noticed that I don´t have tc_normalmap on my normalmaps and figured i should change that. Dont know if anything will improve or change if i do but eh. It´s there for a reason i guess.
Doesnt look weird in the editor though. Also. Got any good suggestions for getting sharper textures in udk? Seems like the diffuse is getting blurry. Texturegroup skybox, lodbias -1 is what i do now. Anything else?