Micro Exporter UVs

[WAS]

I've tried fixing micro exporter UVs in poseray and Blender and both still come out all messed up. I can't get rid of the hard poly look no matter what I try, or how smooth uvs are. Only real fix for UVs is subdiving, but even with forced edges, and all the settings i can think of, the exports still have tears in the mesh that expand when subdivided.

I tried UVs from a compute terrain, and computer normal and texture coordinates but I dunno. Feel it's something else. I've even welded in many ways, but the tears are so wide in many places they don't weld despite tolerance fiddling.

Has anyone encountered and fixed these UV issues?

Here is a low-poly rock from TG imported back with textures applied.

[Kadri]

I don't tried UV's from Terragen (how do you tried it actually?). So i can't say much.
I used Lightwave to make when i needed them.

Not sure but i suspect you have maybe a clean up of geometry problem going on.
Terragen geometry export is messy (when i used it at least). There where overlapping polygons and-or holes mostly.
But i didn't get the look you got. The objects were usable even if they needed work.

[WAS]

I don't understand, how can that polygon show of a rock be usable? Lol

Some of the textures or striping the UVs seem so messed up.

And the micro exporter has checkboxes and drop downs for normals/uvs.

I guess I'll look how to bake UV from the mesh in blender, may help than recalcs

[Kadri]

As i said can't say much about UV.
But i just made this 10 minute test now with a fakestone i exported,
cleaned up a little in Lightwave and imported as an OBJ ones again into Terragen.

[WAS]

I don't have lightwave so that's kinda not helpful.

Seems an object from TG can either go back into TG, or get fixed for other applications, not be interchangeable with poseray/blender with what I know how to do. But still can't get a solid object to subdivide for stuff my friend wanted to do in UE5 with RD textures.

[Kadri]

Hmm...
It is clear what am i trying to say. There is maybe something problematic with your workflow. Just guessing of course.
There could be anything related to Terragen too. But i am just trying to show you that exporting from terragen is possible.
As you said how this could be any usefull. As you see it can quite be useful.
I even exported full scenes that i used front projections of Terragen just to get faster rendering in Lightwave.

With just guessing there is not much i can do more then this.
If you could upload one problematic object here then maybe me or others could be more helpful.

[Kadri]

This is a clean up with just PoseRay.
(I had to use Lightwave to get rid of the outside stuff but i exported without any other clean up work to Poseray)

The object does still have some polygons that i could unify after Poseray (nearly 180 000 polygons) in Lightwave.
But still could be useful probably.


I tried Blender but even using the viewport is hard for now to me. Couldn't do anything there.

[Kadri]

I tried to kinda replicate those kind of problems in Lightwave.
The closes was when i first tried to lower the polygon count (decimate?) and then made clean up (welding-merging points and unifying polygons).

[WAS]

Well the issue is, what looks good in TG looks bad in UE4 or Blender, or even lightwave. 

I'm also using much power MPD settings for the low poly exports. 0.1 or 0.05 actually (which works fine for low poly) but all the objects suffer visible tears on even import into PoseRay without edit. The lighting is wrong in PoseRay and Blender too.

[Matt]

I wonder if it's something other than the UVs. Try a "Visualise Tex Coords" shader on its own to see what the UVs are doing. Without knowing what your shaders are it's hard to know (a TGD would tell us this), but I have an inkling that you might be using with something with "Distort by normal".

[WAS]

I wonder if it's something other than the UVs. Try a "Visualise Tex Coords" shader on its own to see what the UVs are doing. Without knowing what your shaders are it's hard to know (a TGD would tell us this), but I have an inkling that you might be using with something with "Distort by normal".

I'll give it a short if I can figure it out.

These rocks are just squashed sphere, a PF for angular shape (voronoi ridges), a Perlin PF to variate the shape, and a PF for surface detail followed by a computer terrain/normal (tried both) with a patch size of 1. I'll post it up in a moment.

I'm thinking the surface detail may be too rough to have such low mpd (even 0.5) settings without calc errors trying to figure out how to keep the mesh intact.

[Matt]

When applying Power Fractals to imported geometry, you may need to turn off "distort by normal" (I thought I had fixed this issue, I'm going to check now to see what the status of that is).

The UVs might be OK. The Compute Terrain/Normal also isn't designed for imported geo. To cut a long story short, if you're verifying UVs I would start with a simple image map shader (or Visualise Tex Coords); the more complex your network, the more likely it is that you're seeing some other issue.

[WAS]

Jeez, you know what, I think I have distort by normal on for those colour shaders! I know for a fact the fractal breakup on the surface layer will.

[WAS]

Yep. Single PF no distort by normal.  This is the 0.05 MPD low one at 3mb.

It was the surface layer's breakup messing things up making me think fixed objects weren't working in TG.

[WAS]

Interesting, should have known. If you use a much smaller patch size, for instance 0.01, your UVs exported look much better than even with recalculation with PoseRay. Additionally, I've attached my rock exporter, just change the save path n' stuff in the micro exporter.

It seems though that you need to adjust patch size to the scales representative of your exported geometry. So for a 1m radius rock, 0.01 seems adequate. This should probably be mentioned on the Wiki entry.