Quick question about masks. How do you create the normal map information for them? Do you paint them in manually and have a plug-in convert them (a la nvidia normal map filter in photoshop) or do you model them and bake them with a 3D program?
Quick question about masks. How do you create the normal map information for them? Do you paint them in manually and have a plug-in convert them (a la nvidia normal map filter in photoshop) or do you model them and bake them with a 3D program?
Any way you want, though, typically I think the masks might come after the normal maps, with the masks you could reuse one normal map several times
I really love a lot of these features highlighted for UE4 but considering all the posts about lack of features (emmisive lighting and animated light maps) is it still worth it or should I stick with UDK until they support more features?
Granted it seems like this is small stuff. I really want to check it out though and don't wanna get burned 20 bucks in doing so. Whaddya guys think?
Masking isn't difficult. Explore the ones within UE4 and look at each individual channel it tells a much different picture.
With this example a base AO is in the Red channel while Blue and green are used for other purposes like colours or reflectivity. So you would just base the normal map on the AO or create the AO from your normal map and use the other channels for masking. (The normal map would be a separate texture). You just have to examine every channel with masking textures because each channel likely serves a different purpose.
I really love a lot of these features highlighted for UE4 but considering all the posts about lack of features (emmisive lighting and animated light maps) is it still worth it or should I stick with UDK until they support more features?
Granted it seems like this is small stuff. I really want to check it out though and don't wanna get burned 20 bucks in doing so. Whaddya guys think?
It's worth it, the UI and interface is amazing, it feel so clean, polished, and flexible. The lightmapping is better, but it's still light mapping. Blue prints are insanely powerful and can be used by anyone for tons of different things. The PBR materials are amazing and are a huge improvement over UDK. Definitely worth $20 to play around with and make some new portfolio pieces with. It's really quick to get a scene to setup and the reflection probes work well too. Also there's a ton of free example content, way more so than with UDK.
I really love a lot of these features highlighted for UE4 but considering all the posts about lack of features (emmisive lighting and animated light maps) is it still worth it or should I stick with UDK until they support more features?
Granted it seems like this is small stuff. I really want to check it out though and don't wanna get burned 20 bucks in doing so. Whaddya guys think?
I'd say it's worth it if you wanna set up complex scenes with nice lighting. For small assets I'd just go with Marmoset Toolbag 2, but otherwise...
As for things like the emissive lighting, there are ways to get around it (temporary, hopefully they fix it all anyway), so it shouldn't be THAT bad.
As ZacD said, the pros of the engine are so big that the cons just can't bring it down.
I'd say it's worth it if you wanna set up complex scenes with nice lighting. For small assets I'd just go with Marmoset Toolbag 2, but otherwise...
As for things like the emissive lighting, there are ways to get around it (temporary, hopefully they fix it all anyway), so it shouldn't be THAT bad.
As ZacD said, the pros of the engine are so big that the cons just can't bring it down.
I completely agree. I actually love the new ligthing system, even with lightmaps. Stationary lights pretty much completely remove artifacting and the ability to change the brightness on run-time is really awesome. Lightmass builds a TON quicker and I find that you get about the same amount of visual fidelity with a 256 lightmap as you used to get with a 1024. Overall there are just so many improvements from UI to Environment probes to PBR.. it's just a no brainer. Removing emissive lighting sucks.... but why anyone would use a feature with so little contrl is kind of beyond me... you can fake it so easily.... don't know why people are flipping their lids.
But anyways, I'm in love with it and can't wait to use it a ton more!
Emissive lighting is actually part of bigger problem, which is lack of are lighting and shadowing.
You can fake, area lighting using point lights, but you don't get physically correct results at all.
You can adjust point and spot light reflection shape, to make it more correct (wide tube), but diffuse shape is still the same, which in turn cast incorrect lighting.
Area lights will definitely be implemented in engine at some point, as it is very important part of getting correct diffuse lighting.
Though lacking of it, is not as bad as some people claim it to be, saying that is not an issue is not true at all.
During beta there was Emissive lighting at some point, but it was removed, for technical reasons.
They also had proper area lighting in the works at some point, but I don't know what happened to them.
If I'm not mistaken before the removal of the SVOGI they also had fully dynamic emissive material lighting which was so impressive, I hope that they'll reimplement that system again, I think it's a matter of not enough hardware power for the average consumer at the moment which would be only a matter of time.
I just picked up UE4 w00t! I've got a few questions though..
I'm starting a personal project and I want to use UE4 for it.
I'm curious what the best way is to force the engine to not compress my textures and basically render out the highest possible quality of everything as I am not concerned at all with performance. I want to use unreal as a game art version of keyshot. The best example of this would be Jordan Walkers art(see below).
I'm pretty new to unreal as I haven't even used UDK in quite awhile so any help would be greatly appreciated.
you can check a "defer compression" checkbox on the texture properties (double click texture asset). However when you save the texture it will compress it. Best bet would be to import your stuff, save it, then check that box. Can bring in your 4096's and draw them uncompressed easily
you can check a "defer compression" checkbox on the texture properties (double click texture asset). However when you save the texture it will compress it. Best bet would be to import your stuff, save it, then check that box. Can bring in your 4096's and draw them uncompressed easily
Awesome! Thanks.
One more question: At what point does a texture get "saved" and therefore compressed? (is it at the time where I save the entire package or scene/level?) And if I already have a texture imported and it's probably compressed, is there any special options that I need to do in addition to checking that box to get it looking all nice and pretty again?
One more question: At what point does a texture get "saved" and therefore compressed? (is it at the time where I save the entire package or scene/level?) And if I already have a texture imported and it's probably compressed, is there any special options that I need to do in addition to checking that box to get it looking all nice and pretty again?
It gets saved when you save the asset or when you "save all", there are no more packages. If it does get compressed you can always "reimport" to get back to an uncompressed state I believe.
I just picked up UE4 w00t! I've got a few questions though..
I'm starting a personal project and I want to use UE4 for it.
I'm curious what the best way is to force the engine to not compress my textures and basically render out the highest possible quality of everything as I am not concerned at all with performance. I want to use unreal as a game art version of keyshot. The best example of this would be Jordan Walkers art(see below).
I'm pretty new to unreal as I haven't even used UDK in quite awhile so any help would be greatly appreciated.
Here's a couple things to keep in mind when trying to just use UE4 as a renderer:
1. polycount isnt as important. Keeping it low will help import time, but give it enough so the details cast shadows.
2. Material layers will help keep your resolution high, and give you assets you can reuse across multiple projects (you only have to make 1 gold).
3. Image based lighting is the way to go, import a lat/long HDRI like this one:
you can set it as the ambient cubemap in yoiur post process, or plug vertexnormal *-1 and plug that into texture coordinates for it in a material and set as emissive, then use skylight in your scene.
I may write a blog post soon on how to get a single asset lit and displayed nicely so i'll let you know when that's up.
Are there any videos out there that focus solely on the material layers workflow? I feel like I'm over-thinking it and making it seem more complicated than it is. I checked the recent UE4 tutorial videos and didn't really find anything focusing on Material Layers per-say. There is also that older video with the trike but I'm looking for something a little more in-depth.
Are there any videos out there that focus solely on the material layers workflow? I feel like I'm over-thinking it and making it seem more complicated than it is. I checked the recent UE4 tutorial videos and didn't really find anything focusing on Material Layers per-say. There is also that older video with the trike but I'm looking for something a little more in-depth.
I had some issues getting started with it, but figured it out.
1. Create a material function for each layer material (basically recreate each material).
2. Drag and drop those functions into your actual material.
3. Use the mask and and MatLayerBlend_Simple
4. Make sure the final material node (The one that normally has a bunch of inputs) is set to show MaterialAttributes
It doesn't look like there isn't an in-depth video on our youtube channel on Material Functions & Layers, we should definitely make one! What are you currently doing?
A video example that covers how the Infiltrator character is set up would be helpful for folks. I've seen the last video where it explains what the layered materials are, but not how they're set up.
Thanks for the info! I guess my net biggest reservation is: What about assets with large amounts of edge wear and localized wear-and-tear? Don't you lose some of the fidelity of custom textures by using a Material Layer workflow? Or am I completely wrong?
It doesn't look like there isn't an in-depth video on our youtube channel on Material Functions & Layers, we should definitely make one! What are you currently doing?
basically working on this scene at the moment (Link to WIP thread in Sig)
Would love to do a material layer pass on it since there will certainly be Metals, Painted Metals, Glossy Plastics, etc. Not sure if that the way to go though.
Thanks for the info! I guess my net biggest reservation is: What about assets with large amounts of edge wear and localized wear-and-tear? Don't you lose some of the fidelity of custom textures by using a Material Layer workflow? Or am I completely wrong?
Would love to do a material layer pass on it since there will certainly be Metals, Painted Metals, Glossy Plastics, etc. Not sure if that the way to go though.
It's not great for a lot of unique detail in Basecolor or roughness. But if you want to establish your material values, quickly get a scene and materials blocked out, its great. You can only have 4 materials per layered materials. You can do edge detail with a mask, and overlay a normal map on top of the layered materials to a unique normal map, and that works well. You could overlay over textures on top too, if you want to, and use the material layers as advanced detail normal maps.
It's not great for a lot of unique detail in Basecolor or roughness. But if you want to establish your material values, quickly get a scene and materials blocked out, its great. You can only have 4 materials per layered materials. You can do edge detail with a mask, and overlay a normal map on top of the layered materials to a unique normal map, and that works well. You could overlay over textures on top too, if you want to, and use the material layers as advanced detail normal maps.
Really appreciate the thoughts/insight. That all sounds awesome
I'm gonna go ahead and start my first detail pass on my scene with the methods you suggested. I'll also study that in-engine material Jordan suggested. (although, down the road, a video with even more advanced methods would still be really awesome!)
It's also nice for models you don't want to make unique textures for. I juse used it for a fire sprinkler on a office ceiling, there's the main color, the red tube, copper material around where the red tube connects, and a bit of brass at the tip. I could either make separate textures for BaseColor, metalnesss, Roughness, and normal map, or just use layered materials with a 128x128 mask.
It's not great for a lot of unique detail in Basecolor or roughness. But if you want to establish your material values, quickly get a scene and materials blocked out, its great. You can only have 4 materials per layered materials. You can do edge detail with a mask, and overlay a normal map on top of the layered materials to a unique normal map, and that works well. You could overlay over textures on top too, if you want to, and use the material layers as advanced detail normal maps.
You can have more material layers if you use less textures in them.
For example we will create stain material layers that only have a base color map and multiply against lower layers and change the roughness.
For bolts/clamps small metal bits we will use material layers that are solid colors rather than textures.
not every edge or wear needs to be a new layer. We actually build our material layers to have a scratch and a grime input that blends in solid colors for scratches and grime. So each layer has it's own scratch and grime appearance.
I know we need to get some information out there on 'good' workflows for this, it's still very new but i'll look into putting something together.
I know we need to get some information out there on 'good' workflows for this, it's still very new but i'll look into putting something together.
Yeah I haven't experimented enough with it to figure out everything possible. I'm sure there's some substance designer like crazyness you can do with it.
Here's a couple things to keep in mind when trying to just use UE4 as a renderer:
1. polycount isnt as important. Keeping it low will help import time, but give it enough so the details cast shadows.
2. Material layers will help keep your resolution high, and give you assets you can reuse across multiple projects (you only have to make 1 gold).
3. Image based lighting is the way to go, import a lat/long HDRI like this one:
you can set it as the ambient cubemap in yoiur post process, or plug vertexnormal *-1 and plug that into texture coordinates for it in a material and set as emissive, then use skylight in your scene.
I may write a blog post soon on how to get a single asset lit and displayed nicely so i'll let you know when that's up.
Thanks for the info! and I can't wait for that blog post.
1. Something I'm curious about is, in a default starting scene with nothing but the sky and a few tables and a chunk of ground... does that have any sort of IBL by default? I had imagined the skybox would be lighting the scene at least a little. Is that not how its setup though? I notice some unnaturally dark areas on my test mesh even though the sky looks as though it should be lighting it via ambient lighting.
2. Contact shadows seem to show up only on some items. Not really sure what does or doesn't make them show up. Anyone have any tips?
Only went 3 deep (sans alpha), but I completely get the theory behind it now. I can tell that assigning materials on a per-pixel basis instead of a per-polygon basis is going to be my new favorite thing. Can't wait to make this my own!!!!
Holy molly, the editor is so heavy, i can't get more than 10 fps on a empty scene even with the quick scalability settings, am i doing something wrong?
Sorry if this has been brought up before, but I played a bit with layered materials and I'm wondering,
If you have more than 4 materials in an object, do you need more textures
or is there a way to get, let's say a ddo like color separation with a node or several?
I don't think color picking is cheap or quick enough to do realtime in a shader. I just created a 2nd mask texture for a project I'm working on with layered materials.
Only went 3 deep (sans alpha), but I completely get the theory behind it now. I can tell that assigning materials on a per-pixel basis instead of a per-polygon basis is going to be my new favorite thing. Can't wait to make this my own!!!!
Unfortunately pixel blending of materials is very expensive operations. To the point where using many separate materials on per polygon will be cheaper.
Was going to ask about how my system would fair up running this but after seeing comments on peoples machines who are supperior to mine... I think I just need to upgrade first!
Only went 3 deep (sans alpha), but I completely get the theory behind it now. I can tell that assigning materials on a per-pixel basis instead of a per-polygon basis is going to be my new favorite thing. Can't wait to make this my own!!!!
What's wrong with the red spray on the R? Is that blending issue only in the mesh viewport or is that all over?
I haven't messed around with this stuff too much yet. Need to apparently. Seems very promising.
Holy molly, the editor is so heavy, i can't get more than 10 fps on a empty scene even with the quick scalability settings, am i doing something wrong?
It seems to use a LOT of video memory. Right now in my own scene that has very little texture work done I am already using more than 1.5 GB video memory! I am playing with everything cranked to the max though (high resolution and AA too).
If it's lagging your viewport you can always disable real-time so that it only updates when you move the camera. Note that some things like pressing simulate will automatically switch it back to real-time.
I'm in the early stages of a project and do a lot of blocking out with placeholder meshes I import from max. Now, in UDK I could completely forego lightmaps (and having a second UV channel) for these objects by setting the lightmass resolution to 0 in UDK, which would force lighting information to be stored in the vertices. Or something like that.
Now I can't help but notice that in U4 you can't go below 4... does that mean that I can't do this anymore?
What's wrong with the red spray on the R? Is that blending issue only in the mesh viewport or is that all over?
I haven't messed around with this stuff too much yet. Need to apparently. Seems very promising.
That was my bad, I forgot to turn anti-aliasing off so it's basically trying to do a blend between the two materials. I'm assuming that you'd probably wanna draw your masks with 0 AA to get sharp masks/blends
Unfortunately pixel blending of materials is very expensive operations. To the point where using many separate materials on per polygon will be cheaper.
It's best to combine both methods.
Thanks for the insight! As I start blocking out the textures for my scene today I will certainly keep that in mind.
On say, a single pipe with a single material I would just use a basic instanced material with a separate material ID as an example of your suggestion.
I'm in the early stages of a project and do a lot of blocking out with placeholder meshes I import from max. Now, in UDK I could completely forego lightmaps (and having a second UV channel) for these objects by setting the lightmass resolution to 0 in UDK, which would force lighting information to be stored in the vertices. Or something like that.
Now I can't help but notice that in U4 you can't go below 4... does that mean that I can't do this anymore?
In the world properties use FORCE NO PRE-COMPUTED LIGHTING and hit Build. However, if you have a Directional Light you still have to make it Moveale in order to get dynamic shadows. Personally, I wouldn't even bother checking FORCE NO PRE-COMPUTED LIGHTING I would just make all my lights move-able, which basically just gives you the completely dynamic lighting workflow.
In the world properties use FORCE NO PRE-COMPUTED LIGHTING and hit Build. However, if you have a Directional Light you still have to make it Moveale in order to get dynamic shadows. Personally, I wouldn't even bother checking FORCE NO PRE-COMPUTED LIGHTING I would just make all my lights move-able, which basically just gives you the completely dynamic lighting workflow.
I was afraid this would be the case. I think dynamic shadows will end up being too demanding though, might just have to create them UVs.
Also in UDK if I switched from dynamic lights to proper static ones with baked light bounce and all, the scene would look crazy different. Baking into vertex info was just quick and fairly accurate, even if it was butt ugly.
Here's an update on the Xnormal / Synced normals pipeline.
We found 2 steps to better sync normal map rendering:
The first step is a setting in xnormal you can change to make it better synced with our rendering:
Click the plug icon on the bottom left
Click Tangent basis calculators tab
Select Mikk - TSpace plugin
Click Configure button
Check the Compute binormal in pixel shader box.
( I will make sure the docs are updated with this)
The second step was a change to our renderer and will be available in the next release. The good news is you can go ahead and make this xnormal change and when the next version of Unreal Engine is available to you, your art will look better.
Replies
Any way you want, though, typically I think the masks might come after the normal maps, with the masks you could reuse one normal map several times
Granted it seems like this is small stuff. I really want to check it out though and don't wanna get burned 20 bucks in doing so. Whaddya guys think?
With this example a base AO is in the Red channel while Blue and green are used for other purposes like colours or reflectivity. So you would just base the normal map on the AO or create the AO from your normal map and use the other channels for masking. (The normal map would be a separate texture). You just have to examine every channel with masking textures because each channel likely serves a different purpose.
It's worth it, the UI and interface is amazing, it feel so clean, polished, and flexible. The lightmapping is better, but it's still light mapping. Blue prints are insanely powerful and can be used by anyone for tons of different things. The PBR materials are amazing and are a huge improvement over UDK. Definitely worth $20 to play around with and make some new portfolio pieces with. It's really quick to get a scene to setup and the reflection probes work well too. Also there's a ton of free example content, way more so than with UDK.
I'd say it's worth it if you wanna set up complex scenes with nice lighting. For small assets I'd just go with Marmoset Toolbag 2, but otherwise...
As for things like the emissive lighting, there are ways to get around it (temporary, hopefully they fix it all anyway), so it shouldn't be THAT bad.
As ZacD said, the pros of the engine are so big that the cons just can't bring it down.
I completely agree. I actually love the new ligthing system, even with lightmaps. Stationary lights pretty much completely remove artifacting and the ability to change the brightness on run-time is really awesome. Lightmass builds a TON quicker and I find that you get about the same amount of visual fidelity with a 256 lightmap as you used to get with a 1024. Overall there are just so many improvements from UI to Environment probes to PBR.. it's just a no brainer. Removing emissive lighting sucks.... but why anyone would use a feature with so little contrl is kind of beyond me... you can fake it so easily.... don't know why people are flipping their lids.
But anyways, I'm in love with it and can't wait to use it a ton more!
You can fake, area lighting using point lights, but you don't get physically correct results at all.
You can adjust point and spot light reflection shape, to make it more correct (wide tube), but diffuse shape is still the same, which in turn cast incorrect lighting.
Area lights will definitely be implemented in engine at some point, as it is very important part of getting correct diffuse lighting.
Though lacking of it, is not as bad as some people claim it to be, saying that is not an issue is not true at all.
During beta there was Emissive lighting at some point, but it was removed, for technical reasons.
They also had proper area lighting in the works at some point, but I don't know what happened to them.
I'm starting a personal project and I want to use UE4 for it.
I'm curious what the best way is to force the engine to not compress my textures and basically render out the highest possible quality of everything as I am not concerned at all with performance. I want to use unreal as a game art version of keyshot. The best example of this would be Jordan Walkers art(see below).
I'm pretty new to unreal as I haven't even used UDK in quite awhile so any help would be greatly appreciated.
Awesome! Thanks.
One more question: At what point does a texture get "saved" and therefore compressed? (is it at the time where I save the entire package or scene/level?) And if I already have a texture imported and it's probably compressed, is there any special options that I need to do in addition to checking that box to get it looking all nice and pretty again?
It gets saved when you save the asset or when you "save all", there are no more packages. If it does get compressed you can always "reimport" to get back to an uncompressed state I believe.
Here's a couple things to keep in mind when trying to just use UE4 as a renderer:
1. polycount isnt as important. Keeping it low will help import time, but give it enough so the details cast shadows.
2. Material layers will help keep your resolution high, and give you assets you can reuse across multiple projects (you only have to make 1 gold).
3. Image based lighting is the way to go, import a lat/long HDRI like this one:
you can set it as the ambient cubemap in yoiur post process, or plug vertexnormal *-1 and plug that into texture coordinates for it in a material and set as emissive, then use skylight in your scene.
I may write a blog post soon on how to get a single asset lit and displayed nicely so i'll let you know when that's up.
I had some issues getting started with it, but figured it out.
1. Create a material function for each layer material (basically recreate each material).
2. Drag and drop those functions into your actual material.
3. Use the mask and and MatLayerBlend_Simple
4. Make sure the final material node (The one that normally has a bunch of inputs) is set to show MaterialAttributes
https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Creating_Layered_Materials_(Tutorial)
Thanks for the info! I guess my net biggest reservation is: What about assets with large amounts of edge wear and localized wear-and-tear? Don't you lose some of the fidelity of custom textures by using a Material Layer workflow? Or am I completely wrong?
basically working on this scene at the moment (Link to WIP thread in Sig)
Would love to do a material layer pass on it since there will certainly be Metals, Painted Metals, Glossy Plastics, etc. Not sure if that the way to go though.
MaterialFunction'/Engine/Functions/MaterialLayerFunctions/ML_ExampleMaterialLayer.ML_ExampleMaterialLayer'
it can be a good starting point for creating a material layer that has some basic inputs
then create a material and enable []use material attributes in the properties
then drop your layers in and blend using MatLayerBlend_... nodes MatLayerBlend_Standard is a good default one
It's not great for a lot of unique detail in Basecolor or roughness. But if you want to establish your material values, quickly get a scene and materials blocked out, its great. You can only have 4 materials per layered materials. You can do edge detail with a mask, and overlay a normal map on top of the layered materials to a unique normal map, and that works well. You could overlay over textures on top too, if you want to, and use the material layers as advanced detail normal maps.
Really appreciate the thoughts/insight. That all sounds awesome
I'm gonna go ahead and start my first detail pass on my scene with the methods you suggested. I'll also study that in-engine material Jordan suggested. (although, down the road, a video with even more advanced methods would still be really awesome!)
You can have more material layers if you use less textures in them.
For example we will create stain material layers that only have a base color map and multiply against lower layers and change the roughness.
For bolts/clamps small metal bits we will use material layers that are solid colors rather than textures.
not every edge or wear needs to be a new layer. We actually build our material layers to have a scratch and a grime input that blends in solid colors for scratches and grime. So each layer has it's own scratch and grime appearance.
I know we need to get some information out there on 'good' workflows for this, it's still very new but i'll look into putting something together.
Yeah I haven't experimented enough with it to figure out everything possible. I'm sure there's some substance designer like crazyness you can do with it.
Thanks for the info! and I can't wait for that blog post.
1. Something I'm curious about is, in a default starting scene with nothing but the sky and a few tables and a chunk of ground... does that have any sort of IBL by default? I had imagined the skybox would be lighting the scene at least a little. Is that not how its setup though? I notice some unnaturally dark areas on my test mesh even though the sky looks as though it should be lighting it via ambient lighting.
2. Contact shadows seem to show up only on some items. Not really sure what does or doesn't make them show up. Anyone have any tips?
I have the same thing, except I have the 550 Ti, and I'm running a pretty consistent 25 fps, unless I do something crazy.
Try lowering these settings.
If you have more than 4 materials in an object, do you need more textures
or is there a way to get, let's say a ddo like color separation with a node or several?
Unfortunately pixel blending of materials is very expensive operations. To the point where using many separate materials on per polygon will be cheaper.
It's best to combine both methods.
What's wrong with the red spray on the R? Is that blending issue only in the mesh viewport or is that all over?
I haven't messed around with this stuff too much yet. Need to apparently. Seems very promising.
Well they did say it requires a beefy computer.
It seems to use a LOT of video memory. Right now in my own scene that has very little texture work done I am already using more than 1.5 GB video memory! I am playing with everything cranked to the max though (high resolution and AA too).
If it's lagging your viewport you can always disable real-time so that it only updates when you move the camera. Note that some things like pressing simulate will automatically switch it back to real-time.
Now I can't help but notice that in U4 you can't go below 4... does that mean that I can't do this anymore?
That was my bad, I forgot to turn anti-aliasing off so it's basically trying to do a blend between the two materials. I'm assuming that you'd probably wanna draw your masks with 0 AA to get sharp masks/blends
Thanks for the insight! As I start blocking out the textures for my scene today I will certainly keep that in mind.
On say, a single pipe with a single material I would just use a basic instanced material with a separate material ID as an example of your suggestion.
In the world properties use FORCE NO PRE-COMPUTED LIGHTING and hit Build. However, if you have a Directional Light you still have to make it Moveale in order to get dynamic shadows. Personally, I wouldn't even bother checking FORCE NO PRE-COMPUTED LIGHTING I would just make all my lights move-able, which basically just gives you the completely dynamic lighting workflow.
I was afraid this would be the case. I think dynamic shadows will end up being too demanding though, might just have to create them UVs.
Also in UDK if I switched from dynamic lights to proper static ones with baked light bounce and all, the scene would look crazy different. Baking into vertex info was just quick and fairly accurate, even if it was butt ugly.
Thanks for the help tho!
We found 2 steps to better sync normal map rendering:
The first step is a setting in xnormal you can change to make it better synced with our rendering:
Click the plug icon on the bottom left
Click Tangent basis calculators tab
Select Mikk - TSpace plugin
Click Configure button
Check the Compute binormal in pixel shader box.
( I will make sure the docs are updated with this)
The second step was a change to our renderer and will be available in the next release. The good news is you can go ahead and make this xnormal change and when the next version of Unreal Engine is available to you, your art will look better.
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/41-update-preview
Sounds like that is the case. Awesome news indeed!
Yep! We tested both.
Hooray!