UV's with imported static meshes

[fallingbrickwork]

HI all,

I am using the great ase converter to import my models from Modo and everything seems to be working fine. I just have a quick question on UV's.

My model is a VERY long corridor floor section, therefore it looks like a flat plane in a rectagle shape. UV1 is just a flat projection that is scaled up so it is far bigger than the UV 0->1 space... this is to get the tiling correct.

I am now creating UV2 for UDK to hold the lightmaps... if i make an Atlas projection of this, everything gets screwed up in UDK Game View. the on'y way i can get the shadow correct is to make a flat projection like UV1 but keep it within 0->1 UV space... problem with this is, the UV polys are only taking up a fraction of the UV space and the shadows are extremely blocky, as you can imagine!

What should i be doing?

On a side note, can the actual sizes of the Lightmaps be altered. ie 512x512, 1024x1024 etc.

Regards,
Matt.

[Nawrot]

Hourences website to the rescue!


This you probably know:
tutorialsue3lightmap.htm

There are tips for optimizing meshes:
tutorialsue3modeling2.htm

You should cut your big mesh into smaller pieces.
Dynamic lights work better on smaller meshes, because they force update only for small mesh not one huge. When mesh is affected by more than one/two dynamic lights it really slows down rendering.
Smaller meshes are not rendered when they are not in view or occluded, your big mesh will always be in view and always rendered.
Instances of same mesh are rendered faster than one mesh with repeated geometry. For eg. one pillar repeated as multiple meshes is faster than one mesh with multiple pillars.

Just read hourences tutorial.

As for lightmap sizes, one default setting for all instances of mesh is in mesh editor (double click on mesh icon in browser). And you can override that setting on per instance of mesh based manner, it is in mesh properties (select mesh in level and presss F4) it in very bottom of list.

[fallingbrickwork]

Many thanks!

I'll check out these tuts now.

Matt.

[Norman3D]

If it's essentially a flloor what you are doing, use BSP

the on'y way i can get the shadow correct is to make a flat projection like UV1 but keep it within 0->1 UV space... problem with this is, the UV polys are only taking up a fraction of the UV space and the shadows are extremely blocky, as you can imagine!

There is no way around this, if you still want to use a static mesh, try to add some segments, and split the uvs in half in order to use all of the space in the UV, it might result in light seams, tho.