Help on Skeletal Mesh

[mr_fox]

Hello there, I'm new to UDK and currently using it for my MA thesis to create an architectural visualisation, part of which involves some doors that open via a touch trigger. I imported the doors as skeletal meshes after animating them in 3DS Max and everything went fine except now they don't receive shadows from any of the surrounding static meshes as you can see in the image...



The doors on the left and right of the image are skeletal meshes and the door in the middle and the door frames are static meshes which work fine. I made sure the dominant directional light was casting static and dynamic shadows and I found some information in a different thread saying Physics Assets need to be created, which I did, and they improved things slightly but they still aren't right.

Does anyone have any idea about how to fix this problem?

Thanks!

[Mauriccio93]

You can try importing them as a Static Mesh without any animation and just place them in the level as an InterpActor so they can move using Matinee inside of your Kismet sequence.

[fighter5347]

Here is a tutorial how to animate a simple door in matinee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYjIICNeW6U

Here the solution:

Use a dominant directional light moveable instead of the static dominant directional. As skeletal meshes are dynamic object, you also have to use a dynamic light

[mr_fox]

Thanks for the replies. I tried importing them as static meshes first but having the pivot in the wrong place (they weren't created at 0,0,0 in Max) caused problems which is why I went the skeletal mesh route.

The dominant directional light moveable seems to have helped a bit but I'm still having problems...



The doors should look like the one in the middle, as they were originally the same object with the same maps, but they're looking a bit washed out and cartoonified. After a bit of playing with settings I've got the shadows looking pretty good, thanks to the cascaded shadow maps options, but still having the door issues...

[mr_fox]

That image has come out a bit larger than anticipated, sorry!

[gaz661]

you can move the pivot of an actor by going to its properties and find the prepivot section under the motion tab.

[mr_fox]

aaah, thanks Gaz, that's excellent, should make my life a lot easier!