noob needs help with blender, udk

[ghost360]

Hello everyone
I have a question about blender to udk, I created a door frame and exported it to udk by following a few tutorials, wagdogs in particular.
I made the mesh and added a white material to it, uv unwrapped it, exported the uv to gimp to texture and then I imported the mesh and texture into udk and I made material with just that texture and applied it to the mesh, it looked fine. But heres my real question am I missing something, Ive read few other post talking about lightmaps and diffuse and so on.
Im using 2.53 beta btw.

any help to clear this up would be greatly appreciated.
Ps sorry for the long article LOL.

[Analdin]

Please don't use the 2.53 Beta, it's still a bit unstable and it's missing important features like the rendering of AO Maps and Normal Maps...
I use v 2.49, everything works like a charm.

Still, if you want to use the latest build (currently 2.53), then you maybe should export your finished project in 2.53 as .OBJ file or something, and then import it into v 2.49 for the baking/rendering and final export to UDK...

Hope that helped!
Cheers!

//Edit: In case anyone wants to know more about Normal Maps or AO Maps, here you go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mapping

Both of the features shoed in the links above aren't archievable with v 2.53, as it's lacking almost every render function (besides the full scene render).

[ghost360]

Thank you for the reply.
I do have 2.49 installed but I thought 2.53 did have those two features
http://img21.imageshack.us/f/blenderbake.png/
or do those not work or something I havent tried them so I dont know.

So does that mean I should create light maps and normal maps for meshes.
And if so any tuts out there that shows how this can be done or is wagdod and Raven67854's tuts enough.

Here is the doorframe I created
http://img821.imageshack.us/f/doorframe.png/
thats with just the texture.
Thank you in advance.

[ghost360]

Cant anybody help me Please, all i want to know is do I need a light map and-or normal map or whatever else or am I good to go just texturing the uv image and importing it to udk to make a material with.

again thanks in advance.

[KenD]

Lightmaps I'm not certain about but you should make your normals. I've been following the tutorials on blendercookie and they show how and what you need to do for alot of this stuff.

[ghost360]

Thank you. ill check it out asap, and I do have another question (yes I know they just keep coming LOL) when I imported my mesh into udk I got this error aboutvertex count exceeds expected percentage XX percent vs 25, is that anything to worry about.
thanks again.

[Hyper_Shado]

I've made a few models so far from Blender to UDK, and here's what I do: I bake out 2 textures for the mesh, 1 which is basically diffuse and one which is the normal map.

It sounds to me like you're making your texture from scratch, which I guess is okay but IMO a big waste of time. (Plus, I'm no artist >_>) Instead, apply Blender materials to the mesh with all the different colors and procedural textures (which you may or may not like depending on preference - I think they're alright in some situations, but I'm sure you could make better-looking textures with Photoshop or GIMP). Then I bake out 2 images to separate .TGA files.

1. Diffuse. Now, the ugly thing to do is select "Textures" and bake, which will give you the basic color for each part. However, by using Ambient Occlusion you can get much nicer-looking colors that show a bit of natural (but fake) lighting. It's easy - just take all the lights/extra stuff out of your current scene, turn on AO (set the samples to 15 and the energy to somewhere around 2) and then select Bake: Full Render. You might want to Subsurf the model a few times for this too, to get a more detailed-looking texture.

2. Normals. Now, this is a bit easier. Just select Bake: Normals, select "Tangent" in the dropdown box, and you're done. This is an area where you really should Subsurf the model to get high-res normals (though in the case of the door-frame it's probably unnecessary, and I doubt you need a normal map at all). There's some thing that the rich guys/pirates with Max and Maya do that's similar to this, but probably much better. This is just my attempt to emulate that technique, so someone let me know if I'm doing something dumb.

Now, make sure you didn't permanently apply that Subsurf, import everything into the UDK, and it should look pretty nice. No need to fool around with any lightmap stuff - the engine handles lighting, after all. All you really need is a diffuse texture, really.

[ghost360]

Ah thank you so very much just what I was hoping for, some details. lol.
To be honest I didnt know you could use blender to make the textures so I will give that a shot.
Your description was very clear and VERY helpful thank you.

[Hyper_Shado]

Thanks. I sorta went into Tutorial mode there for a second...lol.

[ghost360]

Hey no problem I love tutorials.lol
But on the serious side, right when I started trying things out blender crashed on me, found it had something to do with one of the things I had plugged into usb or at least I hope anyway.

So im gonna get back to it later and see what happens.

[Hyper_Shado]

Yeah, be careful about that. Anything that takes about 1 GB of RAM will crash my computer - it may be the same for you. Before doing anything that you know will be resource-intensive, save your work.

[ghost360]

Hey sup, I found that out the hard way a while back (lol).

But unfortunately that wasnt the problem here, it was crashing on me randomly for the past few days on both 2.53 and 2.49, I think it was a driver or something I had installed, Im not sure.
But I think I solved the problem (I hope) its been going good for a little while now, keeping my fingers crossed.
And I think I might leave the door frame the way it is

what do you guys think.

[Hyper_Shado]

It looks fine. It is just a door frame, after all.

Still, I hope my advice is useful for future models.

[ghost360]

Thank you and trust me it most certainly will be.
Im working on a few other meshes as we speak, mostly furniture for now but I will be working on character and maybe creature/enemy models in the future.
Again thank you for all your help.

[Crusha K. Rool]

Please don't use the 2.53 Beta, it's still a bit unstable and it's missing important features like the rendering of AO Maps and Normal Maps...
I use v 2.49, everything works like a charm.

Still, if you want to use the latest build (currently 2.53), then you maybe should export your finished project in 2.53 as .OBJ file or something, and then import it into v 2.49 for the baking/rendering and final export to UDK...

Hope that helped!
Cheers!

//Edit: In case anyone wants to know more about Normal Maps or AO Maps, here you go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mapping

Both of the features shoed in the links above aren't archievable with v 2.53, as it's lacking almost every render function (besides the full scene render).

But 2.53 has enough features that justify to be using it already:
-Better performance
-Easier orientation in the interface
-Superbly improved scultping mode (though it's still lacking Sculptris' auto-tesselation feature )
-Many other new features

Only problem for me is currently that I am used to the old 2.49b controls and those are not 100% shipped to the new version, but that's all.


For the missing baking functionalities:
http://www.xnormal.net/Faq.aspx


And you don't need to export-import a model from 2.53 to use it in the old version of Blender, it's enough to use the "append" functionality to import the meshes directly from the .blend file.