Burrill's WIP Thread
Hey guys, I've been visiting this website for months now looking at all the cool art you guys pull off. I also noticed how helpful the Polycount community is and was thinking you guys could give me some feedback on my projects.
Anyway, I have a school assignment that requires us to make an environment.
Last class, we all looked at some of the assets that came with UDK and glanced at their various triangle counts, how they were modeled, and how they were used within the level. We noticed that there are a lot of assets that were pretty high in triangle count (there was a pillar that was around 2,000 triangles).
I made a wall section consisting of 456 triangles but noticed that some parts just looked too flat and some edges didn't look round enough (maybe I don't know how to properly use normal maps in UDK?). I then went back and made a wall section with 644 triangles.
Is that count too high for a wall meant for the Unreal Engine or should I stick with the first wall?
The red part is the geometry added on compared to the original 456 tri wall.
Anyway, I have a school assignment that requires us to make an environment.
Last class, we all looked at some of the assets that came with UDK and glanced at their various triangle counts, how they were modeled, and how they were used within the level. We noticed that there are a lot of assets that were pretty high in triangle count (there was a pillar that was around 2,000 triangles).
I made a wall section consisting of 456 triangles but noticed that some parts just looked too flat and some edges didn't look round enough (maybe I don't know how to properly use normal maps in UDK?). I then went back and made a wall section with 644 triangles.
Is that count too high for a wall meant for the Unreal Engine or should I stick with the first wall?
The red part is the geometry added on compared to the original 456 tri wall.
Replies
My original mesh is basically 1/4th of a circle. I then just made 3 more duplicates and rotated them to make a complete circle. I kind of assumed lighting issues like this would happen if you have overlapping UV's (which this mesh doesn't).
This is in UDK by the way.
Also, Nice work. I think some of the finer details on the walls would work out just as well to be normal mapped and not modeled, even in your lowest poly version (the top parts). I'm really not sure if any of it would cause issues though poly-count wise though, I'd say no but lower is always better.
I just have a simple point light right above it, I have a feeling it might be a light setting.
Here's my lightmap UV:
EDIT: And now i saw that you wrote that it wasn't the same model, we never mind then.
But I would like to fix it just so I can avoid this problem later on.
I have a feeling that there's a box I'm not checking off when exporting/importing.
Simple Shapes
Pink outline to show simple shapes
Each shape has two UV channels, one for the texture, one for the lightmap.
There has to be a fix to this. I looked at some UDK assets and they have curved shapes as well that don't have this problem.
My professor and I looked at some UDK assets and compared it to mine and found out that curved shapes need to have a not curved UV setup, like this:
Unfortunately this is what happened when I built the map:
The light blends nicely from mesh to mesh, but now these ugly lines appear. Anybody know how to get rid of them?
Last post I found out that to get the lighting correct on curved meshes the UV ends have to be at a perfect horizontal or vertical alignment, like the picture in the previous post.
I actually had both the texture channel the same as the lightmap channel, so my texture looked a little warped. I then went and changed the texture UV to be more texture friendly thinking it wouldn't mess my lighting up, but it did. Doesn't UDK treat the lightmap channel separately than the texture channel?
Here's a few images to let you know what I'm talking about:
If I set my UV coordinates like this, the lighting looks fine, but the texture gets warped (I have a simple color on there, but trust me, the texture would look warped):
Here it is ingame. You can see the lighting blends from mesh to mesh:
However, If my UV coordinates look different, I get bad lighting, but my texture of course looks fine:
The bad lighting ingame, each mesh has what looks like independent lighting, it doesn't blend properly:
Anybody know why UDK is doing this? It's really the only problem I'm encountering on this project. Thought I'd post it here while I wait for my username to get Registered on the UDK forums.
_
Decided I should make something small and simple sine I had a week off from school.
The current polycount is 3228, my apologies for not putting it in the images.
Tell me what you think!
For the lighting problems i'm not sure, I can tell you that you don't have to have straight UV layouts to get a good lighting bake, make sure you have your lightmap resolution turned up high enough for it to receive the UV space. That is usually what the banding is, also for your lightmap (I only see a problem in the first one you showed) you aren't using enough space within the UV map, there is far too much clear space, and there really isn't any reason to split that shape up into 4 unless you are going to be using them in other shapes later on.
The only bit of info I can't see in your lightmaps is the resolution you have it at, the default is like 32 I think, try out 128 or 512 if you're feeling cheeky
Just wanted to see if anyone thought the low poly polycount was too high, and if anyone notices some messy topology before I unwrapped and baked the texture.