Guild of Writers

Hi all,
recently i started learning Unreal 4.
I still have to overcome lots of troubles with importing assets in the right way.
Many objects i have , makes use of 3 or even more UV layout channels.
That is not how you are supposed to build in Unreal.
The best way is to keep UV channel 0 for the texturing
and UV channel 1, for the lightmaps.
The lightmaps still have to be build in Blender , but will be painted by Unreal on the available layout space which is made in blender.
Because the neccessary fbx export combines the assets into 1 object with multiple elements , all those elements should have the same channels for texturing and lightmapping.
Thats why i have to change a lot in my blender files, and redo those things.

But now i have imported a first batch of assets and you can already see the potential of Unreal 4.
i know the next picture is not as it should be, but i wanted to share what we can expect once i did it all correct.

Brighter but very beautiful lightning in the cathedral!

Hehe, sounds like fun !

Personally I'm using Unity a lot currently - mostly at work, but also for making Ages in my spare time. It's quite similar to Unreal, from what I can tell.

Yeah, most modern engines don't use a lot of multilayering, so most of the time you'll need to bake your textures into a single one. You might want to have a look at shaders, though: they allow you to use multitexturing on some objects. Unreal even has a simple graphical editor for shaders, unlike Unity in which you need to write the shader program yourself (very annoying). Might be worth a look.
The sky of my canyon Age uses something like 5-6 animated layers, and I managed to bring it back to life in Unity by writing a shader for it.

Speaking of shaders, both engines also have some very nice image effects - real time ambient occlusion, sun rays, etc.

Is the FBX import that bad ? In Unity it seems a lot more efficient: all objects in the FBX are imported as children to a master empty. This way I just have to export a dozen of areas each into its own FBX file (all areas are on their own Blender layer anyway), and once in Unity all objects and materials are preserved, like so:

Show Spoiler

Anyway, enjoy yourself !