Hello!
Over at my
Building an environment thread I've ran in to some troubles within UDK, specifically with the terrain tools. Additionally, I have some questions about lighting foliage.
Hopefully I can get some help here and regurgitate it over there!
- Any tips for lighting foliage/foliage material setup for better lighting results? My current setup can REALLY show off that these are just simple criss-crossing quads. This is 'OK' but not great.
- Is there anything I need to do to tell UDK to update the materials used on my terrain? I swear the adjustments I'm making aren't showing up right away and are only triggered by something.. I just don't know whats doing it
- Do normal maps even work on terrain? Or is this part of my problem with #2 where I am not getting my changes to show up? AAaaaargh FACE PUNCH.
Thank you in advance!
Replies
Look under the Materials section. I realize you know how to do this already, but look at his UPDATE right under the painting terrain picture. I had a problem last night where my terrain turned white while I was painting and I just moved the entire terrain a tiny amount and then moved it back and it updated itself. I don't know if that will help you, but it's worth a try...
Alternatively, I am starting to think of using a static mesh as my terrain and just using the blend painting tools. If I were to do that...
1 - How would I go about getting grass to show up on that mesh? Would I have to manually place all my grass?
2 - Can I export UDK terrain to an OBJ?
http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=716496
1. Select terrain
2. Go to "file/export selected"
3. Export as .obj
4. Import .obj into desired editor
I'm not too great with terrain so I don't know anything when it comes to terrain vs. a static mesh... But there is number 2 answered :P
Crap, I figured as much. I went with the crossed solution to save on triangle count. My scene is already 230k!
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ContentBlog.html#Advanced Mesh Placement
2. I think you can File->Export terrain objects in the editor window
But its totally awesome, so who cares
Maybe you could figure out how to move the mesh/sprite based on the camera position?
As long as your meshes aren't unique, you should be fine...
Edit: WOW way to totally ignore my post Jordan :P
You should cut around masked materials to cut down on overdraw but there's nothing wrong with using planes to represent grass you'll just need to do some custom shader work to light them in a way that avoids lighting like a face.
There's some object properties you should enable on the objects like two sided lighting and shadow ambient only. This will help the "plane" look. There's also some grass examples in UDK you can view on how to make grass shaders (I think it's in the current build although now I'm not sure).
It's also OK to have a high vert count if you LOD out the objects. You can use stuff like MaxDrawDistance to cutout objects at a certain distance or even use LODs to cut down on polies. You could also use worldPositionOffset in the material to scale half of the grass down based on camera distance so you reduce overdraw.