Artifacts

[bnewton81]

Why do i keep getting these ugly "stains" in my meshes? I have recalculated the normals to outside and have it set to smooth (as opposed to solid). I forgot to take a picture of the actual mesh before i closed blender, but the verts are not skewed or anything just grabbed the tip vert and moved it with smooth falloff on. This happens a lot to me. I get a mesh done and when i render it looks like crap because of tearing or whatever it is called.

[Calena]

That's really strange since it's being rendered in Blender. I can't help much because I don't bother rendering anything in Blender that I'm using in URU. But, when it did happen in URU it was caused by bad UV mapping due to stretching and skewing. I find it common when I use extrusion for some reason. I fix it by re-mapping using the "project from view" method. The other thing I've noticed causing strange artifacts (or my mistakes showing up as artifacts ) is duplicate vertices or faces. That's happened to me a few times. Especially if you have two faces on top of each other and the normals are both pointing the same way.

Gosh, I can tell you all about mistakes and consequences. I've made bunches of them, I seem to have the knack .

[bnewton81]

You said you don't bother to render in blender. Why? Just because it will probably not look anything like that in uru? This model isn't even uv mapped. Its simply got a material on it. I'm beginning to think it is just the blender render and the problem isn't with my mesh.

[Calena]

You said you don't bother to render in blender. Why? Just because it will probably not look anything like that in uru?

Yes, what you said. It can look great in Blender and terrible in URU or vice versa. The way the engines render are completely different. The Plasma engine has it's own quirks to deal with, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it. PyPRP is helpful, because it stops the export when something is seriously wrong and prints a message pointing to the problem. Also, I discovered it's faster to just export it and look in URU than it is to set up cameras and lights in Blender. Combine that with the fact that the only way non-artist types like me can get a good depiction of the scene, I have to see the object in the scene setting. All the textures and lights play off each other in the human eye. My object might look great in a vacuum all by itself, but put it in a scene with other shapes and colors and it looks terrible.

Having said that, when I'm going through Blender tutorials to learn the ropes, I render in Blender. But that's not really the same as building the age and putting it all together.

I just realized that you didn't mention which version of Blender you're using. All the different versions seem to have their own quirks. It might be a bug and you aren't doing anything wrong.

[bnewton81]

I'm still using 2.49, but i really like 2.57. I also just read that there is a new beta version of PyPRP 2 for blender 2.57, so i will probably be using that now.