This looks like a combination of very low resolution and poor filtering. Is anti-aliasing on in xNormal? Also make sure that your uv shells are aligned horizontall or vertically to make the aliasing less extreme. With that said, your normals will come out looking a bit cleaner if you weld the mesh together as 1 contiguous…
Also as a result of keeping the serif detail the edgeflow vertically for the right side of the "K" gets pretty bad when extruding and insetting a few times. My "A" handled things fine but I'm guessing due to the less detailed serifs? I cleared all the smoothing groups and then did an Auto-Smooth. Pertty gross compared to…
This looks fantastic mate. Your roof is looking so awesome now! You might have a few little tweaks to go. Eg the vertical beams look to small for the scale of the roof. Perhaps one day you could do a tutorial on hand painting for the les experienced members? And because this member is slightly jelly.
It most likely has something to do with how the mesh vertices were stored in the model file, and UE4 choking on some bad data. I think I ran into something similar once, but I cannot remember exactly what it was, other than baking out to OBJ or something, then re-exporting that as an FBX fixed it.
Definetely yes, overlap as much as you can(without making a clearly repetition over the texture, things like spikes and so on should always be overlapped imo, you won't notice the difference and it saves so much UV Space) . With the tail for example, I would go with a vertical simmetry over the whole tail.
Not quite sure what the question is -- can you show an example? More UV channels = more vertices. Think of your UV channels as the rough equivalent of duplicating your mesh. You can see the difference in the content browser while viewing your meshes. It should list the vert count under the mesh icons :)
I'm so torn about vertex color vs colormap(splatmap). At what point, if ever, does the amount of vertices vertex painted become worse performant than a 2048 or 4096 splatmap? I know vertex colors make some sort of copy of the mesh, but I'm not sure how harsh that can be on performance.
right now the biggest problem with your model is the bad shading you have on several parts of it. You see those black spots? It can be many different things but most likely you have either a soft normal on a 90 degree edge or you have double faces / unwelded vertices in those spots.
What do you mean it doesn't work? The Deform: Only In Volume option is based off the lattice. Make sure you have "Source Volume" checked on under the display section in the command panel. Then adjust "Lattice" rather than "Set Volume". Only vertices inside the lattice should be affected by the control points then.
I see no reference image anywhere, could you reupload maybe? Right now the thing that bothers me most is the horizontal and vertical stripes all over the structure. They're really straining my eyes and I can't stop looking at them, a reference would help a lot in understanding what should be going on there.