Blender to UDK texturing troubles

[ArcOwner]

Hey guys, I am a new UDK user and have a few questions about importing FBX's from Blender.

I have been trying for the past two days to get my meshes from Blender into UDK, I was successful and even managed to perfect my collision, but now I am having new troubles related to textures and importing them. I am using Mapzone to create my textures, now I unwrapped my mesh and applied the texture to the UV via GIMP, but when I import using the FBX format the texture stretches and looks atrocious and I also don't know how to apply my normal maps to the mesh using this method. I first made an entire house with multiple rooms and floors but don't have the unwrapping skill to do something that complex, then I decided to make a wall and then just create the room using multiple meshes (I am busy creating the wall now and thats what I am trying to texture). Is there anyway I can paint my textures and Normal maps onto my meshes in UDK(I have two textures for the wall I want to use both with their own normal maps aswell)? Is there a freeware program I can use to accomplish this or is there a way to do it in Blender where I can get both diffuse and normal maps onto the mesh without stretching or any other undesirable effects.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance

[geodav]

i show how the use blender to create content for UDK
please check my youtube channel for the videos playlist http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9F505CB05DD96D36

any problems check back with me on my UDK support thread, links in my sig

[James Ordner]

I strongly recommend you learn UV unwrapping. It is an essential skill for content creation, and very easy with Blender (though sometimes very tedious). There are hundreds of Blender UV unwrapping tutorials on the internet, and once you understand the basic concepts it is not at all difficult.

AFAIK, there is no way to paint on a material in UDK without using the mesh's UVs. Decals may not use UVs, but that is no way you want to go about creating your material. Here is my general texturing workflow:
-When you finish modelling, UV unwrap your mesh inside Blender. Make it decent, this is what will affect texture stretching.
-Export the UV layout to GIMP, where you can slap on any texture/details/filters that you want.
-Export the mesh and the texture to UDK.

You seem to know what to do from there. You can import a normal map and use it in the same material you use your diffuse texture in, just plug it into the 'Normal' node. The normal map will use the same UV coordinates as the diffuse texture.

[ArcOwner]

Ok so I managed to apply the texture thanks to @James advice, but my textures are still stretched horribly, is their any work around? Or is my best bet just to make 32X32 textures?
I know the basics of UV unwrapping but is their maybe something I am missing like scaling or something? The normal maps look okay, its just the stretching.
@Geodev, have you got any intermediate videos? I watched your one video and it showed me how to do things I already knew how to do so if you have any more advanced videos that would help me a great deal, I am looking forward to checking your weapon creation videos when I get to that part of my project =). Thanks for the help so far guys.

[James Ordner]

I'm not sure if this is your problem, but make sure your texture coordinates are set to UV in Blender. By default they are set to 'Generated,' which ignores your UVs and does its own thing. Setting it to UV will give you a view of what it will look like in UDK. Also make sure the Projection is set to 'Flat'.

[geodav]

Hi Arc, not sure what you need for tutorials, most game textures start with the size of 512x512 but it sounds like your doing static meshes so you might want to be a bit more careful with the uv's for the lightmap channel.

can you post some pictures to give us an idea on where the problem is

[ArcOwner]

Hmm, at the risk of sounding super novice right now, is there a difference between static meshes and meshes, if so what are the differences and will it make texturing them any different? I was under the impression that they are the same thing.
Thanks once again for the help

[Spoof]

Static meshes don't contain any bones, bone influences or morph targets. Skeletal meshes do. Meshes are just the collective term for any mesh

Static meshes are generally used for scenery, everything from walls, floors, props, projectiles. Skeletal meshes are used for character animation, or vehicles and articulated props, etc.

But they all use the same texturing techniques. You'll have to get used to the idea of UV unwrapping meshes for games, because that's how it's done. Materials in Blender (Max, Maya, etc.) allow alternatives because they aren't just for games, but CG in general, and there are a lot of techniques you can use in these apps that work well for offline rendering, but don't work at all as game assets.

[ArcOwner]

Hmm, thanks Spoof,
my major problem is that I just can figure out how to get two different textures onto a single static mesh, I have a wall that I want to texture and although I did manage to get two textures on them it was in a single UV map that I imported into GIMP and then just used the fill all tool to fill in the faces with the textures where I needed them, thus not allowing me to scale the faces up at all as the textures were only in certain places on the UV map and as you can imagine this resulted in horribly
stretched looking textures and on top of this when I edited the preset UV/material in UDK I could only apply the normal maps to the entire wall not the different sections I needed.

So I want to try using multiple UV's but whenever I do it just doesn't work so I must be doing something wrong as neither of the two textures show up on the wall when I import it via FBX with the two different textures, the materials both show up but they are just colored materials plugged into the diffuse.

I apologize for the newbie questions and problems as I am sure most of you are way ahead of problems like these, but thanks for the help I appreciate it.

[Spoof]

Aside from searching for tutorials, I suggest examine the assets that come with UDK. You can view all the static meshes, their uv maps and how they use materials and textures. You'll see a pattern emerge of an 'unwrapped' mesh using a square texture as optimally as possible.

For multiples material effects two or more textures are blended in the material shader, often using another texture (or simply a colour/alpha channel of a texture) to control where each are applied.

[ArcOwner]

Thanks for the advice Spoof, Ill do that, unfortunately I have a brand new problem that just arose.

I made a toilet for the bathroom I am working on, and when I import it nothing but a few dots can be seen of the toilet, its like its their but 98% of it is invisible. I did have a problem prior to successfully importing it, UDK stated that I had too many vertices (over 65k or something) I went back into blender and must have removed about 6 rings (which couldn't have been more then 100 verts 200 at most) and then when I tried again it worked, except for the whole invisible toilet thing, I'm not trying to show off to a friend or anything so an invisible toilet is really not what I'm going for. I know it is probably a rookie mistake but any indication to what might be causing this would be appreciated, thanks again.

[James Ordner]

Check to make sure your normals are correct. UDK doesn't render backfaces without specifying in the material.

[Graylord]

Also, considering the amount of polies you're talking about, make sure the object isn't very small. The importer or the exporter tends to skip faces that are so small that they usually wouldn't be visible.

[ArcOwner]

Its strange whenever I import it at subdivisions set to 0 I get over 5000 verts and it appears in UDK just as it is in Blender, but when I set the modifier to 3 it imports with 271 verts and only a few faces are visible.

[ArcOwner]

@Graylord, I set the import scale to 20 and then scaled it up 100 in UDK, I am clueless as to why the modifier seems to affect the viability.