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# 60 09-01-2012 , 07:35 PM
PixalZA's Avatar
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Join Date: May 2011
Location: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Posts: 525
Hi Perferto

You have a couple of options to get higher resolution on your textures. You can increase the texture size as you already mentioned. You can also increase the size of the UV for the door.

If you are planning to animate the door with Kizmet, then it makes sense to import the door section as a separate static mesh. That will give you the opportunity to increase the size of the UV for the door.

If the door section that you highlighted in the UV shot is part of a static mesh that is not going to be animated, then you have some more options available. First will be to cut the object in Maya into smaller pieces and import them separately into UDK. Reconstructing the complete mesh in your scene from the pieces should not be that difficult. I found that by making sure that the pivot point for all the pieces in Maya are the same (I use 0,0,0), then the pieces align easily in UDK. Also you improve your frame rate by doing so as the render engine does not render meshes that are not visible. (Not too small though).

Another alternative if you are going to use it as a single static mesh is to consider a multi-material static mesh. For the example below I used Maya 2011, the ActorX plugin and UDK 2011-11.

First I created a simple structure consisting of two separate polygons in Maya and mapped out the UVs (UVSet map1).
You can have any number of objects. The limit is determined by the number of materials that you will be using for the mesh in UDK. So, you can have 9 objects that will be using 3 materials in UDK. By looking at some of the static meshes that comes with UDK I've noticed that the average number of materials per mesh is one or two with some going as high as 4.
Secondly for each polygon I copied the UVs in map1 into a new UV set (map2).
The trick here is that the UVs for both objects in the first UV set (map1) are not bound to the 0,1 UV space. You can make it as big as you want (Useful for tileable textures) or they can even overlap.
For the example the UVs for the big slab is well outside the 0,1 range while I kept the UVs for the small slab within the 0,1 range.
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With both objects selected, I arranged the UVs in the second UV set (map2) to fall in the 0,1 range with no overlapping UVs. This is important as this UV set will be used for the light map (Pre-calculated static shadows) in UDK.

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The last thing I did (Before the export) was to create a material in Maya for each material that I was going to use for the mesh in UDK and assigned it to the objects in Maya.
For the example I created two lamberts and assigned one to each object. I found out the hard way that the assignment of different materials to the objects in Maya actually causes the "splitting" of the static mesh in UDK. The import process in UDK automatically combines separate objects in the ASE file that share the same material.
Next step was to export using axmesh. You can decide whether you want to convert the objects to triangles yourself to let axmesh do it for you. The import process in UDK will also do it if not already done.

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Last step is to import the static mesh into your UDK package, import your textures, create the materials and assign the materials to the material slots for the mesh.

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What you will notice is that I have set the light map coordinate index to 1 (The index numbers are zero relative) and I increased the light map resolution to 1024 to get sharper edges on the shadows. Look at the light map index for all your meshes and make sure it is pointing to a UV set for each mesh where you have non-overlapping UVs in the 0,1 range.

The static mesh viewed from far and close. The texture for the sign is only 512x512.

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I'm looking forward to see the final version of the level.

PixalZA