I've been trying to figure this out for quit some time without success. The trick for me being that rebuilding the surface in the same shape doesn't keep the same point order which causes blend shape issues. I appreciate you sharing and saving me time!
I've done this by blending my deformation rig between bone and cloth sim driven rigs but it gets slow due to havinng to track cloth vert positions all the time. we opted to bone animate and run the cloth sim stuff as a second pass im the end.
So here we are now. Xendance's bit about the DD light worked, bless your soul, sir/madam! But yeahhhh, there's still this super annoying super-super sharp shadow edges and artifacts all over the place which make everything look totally poopy:
I have a feeling that there is an issue with object centers for the animation. Is there a chance that you can send us screenshots of the issue (or better yet, the blend files)? My main bet is when the motion capture was done (or when the armature was created), the center of the information is higher than "ground level".
The mountains look really cool, but I think the areas where it meets with the grass could be better. I don't know if this is possible in UE4, but I assume you could use some kind of map to control how the two materials blend, so it looks more natural.
ya can be a good practice to give your walls and other flat low poly thigns a few divisions for both tessellation and so you got more verts to carry data for the shader, such as if you wanted to bake AO to vert colour, or use a vertex blend shader.
Hey Dustinbrown, yeah, someone posted some time ago some seriously awesome Mental Ray materials that have wireframe blended in with the normal material. But I thought the OP would want to just display wireframe (which would look quite messy and ugly, anyway).
For a continuous wood texture, you'd probably want to apply a wood texture via procedural texture (I think MODO has a wood grain preset) or apply a wood texture using a bunch of separate, blended textures from multiple UVs... and then bake that down to your UVs.
No not yet, I wanted to get comfortable with UV mapping first, my next goal is to learn how to bake normal maps. Yeah I upscaled some stuff and tried to blend it out, I will avoid doing that from here on out. I worked in 1024x1024 for all of these.
Make the sun a dominant directional light. Won't help with build time much directly, but as the shadows are created in realtime (appears to blend between two lightmaps) you can drop the lightmap resolution considerably and retain those nice shadows. That is, of course, if you're not already using one.