Thursday, 11 February 2010

Problems a foot in-game...

After importing the character into Unreal it was time to test the character in-game. After going to the Customize Player screen via settings in the main menu, it appeared that all textures where present and there was no errors. I was quite pleased to see the character in UT3 and things were looking good:


Character on the Customize Player select screen.

However things changed dramatically once the character entered a match and the camera view was changed to a third person view (This was done by press the tap button and typing in behindview with no spaces) As this video below shows, for some reason the characters torso, arms and bottom of the boots were coming out completely black:

Torso, Arms and bottom of boots are coming out black in-game.


Although all textures were not present it was still pleasing to see that my character was running well within UT3 and worked well with the animations.

After a week of pulling my hair out what hair i have left may i add, i was able to get to the root of the problem. Basically the error was occurring because back in 3DS Max and my mesh was created certain parts of the mesh had different Material ID's assigned to it and the mesh also had different smoothing groups assigned to it. For example the torso would have about 3 material ID's and the same for the smoothing groups. So once imported in the Unreal Editor i had to apply the body texture several times in order for it to appear correctly. I found out via the Epic Games Forums that each material slot within the editor should only have 1 or 2 material slots available to it. So i had to select each part of the body (Helmet, Head, Torso, 2 Shoulder pads, Legs and Boots) individually back in 3DS Max and ensure that all Material ID's were set to 1 and smoothing groups set to 1 as well.

With all material ID's and smoothing groups all sorted now i went back into the Unreal Editor and began to bring all the assets in. When it came to apply the body texture to all the body parts that i had problems with previously instead of having several Material slots now all texture would only require one material slot, with this now corrected it was time to see if this problem had been sorted in-game.

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