I?m making a road in Maya PLE and come across a problem with texturing. It is a road that is made up of four different 1024x1024 textures. As one can see in the photograph:
http://www.deviantart.com/view/8518860/
three of the textures seem to be dominating over the other, giving the illusion that the other has been dropped to the base level of the road. In fact it is on the same plane as the dominating textures. The green arrow shows this.
Here is another angle of the road:
http://www.deviantart.com/view/8518979/
This clearly reveals the fact that the texture is on the correct plane and sitting against the model. The green stroke is to highlight the optical illusion that is created. The centre yellow double lines down at the ?A? have now fully appeared whereas from the angle in the first photo only one could be seen. The ?B? end cuts straight through the gutter.
This is the main problem, Hope someone can help.
I have a sub problem where there is flickering in-between two of the textures. I?m fairly confident I?ll be able to fix this but was wondering if I could get a push in the correct direction. I assume it would either be that the UVs aren?t lined up or there is a thin gap in the model. It?s definitely one object but it may be two shells that aren?t connected.
I would really appreciate help with the first problem. The second is only if you have time.
Already PMed earlier. Beat chya to it Hazard :D So Selwyn, if you haven't already, just check your PM Inbox.
It is really hard to tell these things by looking at a few screen caps, but it looks likt the normals on part of the mesh are flipped. Could be wrong :)
EDIT: Actually the chances of having the Normals facing the wrong way on just that part of the mesh and causing those artifacts is pretty doubtful. I'll just make sure it isn't the same problem Moony had. Is that texture a TGA? If so, try another format. Preferably something that doesn't have a built in alpha channel (ie: a non-32bit image).
Thanks for emailing me the file Selwyn :)
I have two pieces of bad news and one bit of good :)
I had a look at it and tried a few different things. Firstly, you may want to have a quick run over the mesh. There are a few internal faces and some of the verts need to be welded. That didn't seem to fix the problem though. Tried deleting some faces and making new ones. Didn't help. Tried changing the visibility flags so that it was only one sided. Helped a bit but still had some bad areas.
Then I tried a new Shader. I don't know why, but it hates that old Shader. Just apply a new one to that area of the mesh and re-apply the textures. Worked fine for me :) Just in case you don't know how to, select all the faces that make up that area. Right-Click on the faces and go to Materials > Assign New Material > Lambert (or whatever Shader type you want). Just reload all the texture nodes and you should be good to go. Another thing I noticed is that the Shaders had some of their attributes changed when they don't really need to be (Translucence Focus and so on). Unless you really need to, just keep them at their default settings :)
If you have any questions or anything, just ask.
For those folks who would like to know how this saga turned out, there is some very good news and some very bad. The good news is that I have overcome the disappearing problem I was having with the textures with the invaluable help of Aven.
Here is a view of the static mesh road in Unreal
http://www.deviantart.com/view/8740225/
The bad news, needs its context explained. The model was made as one quarter of the road and the multiplied around the central axis. I combined the four quarters and took a UV snapshot of each quarter and then placed the textures. I noticed that there were flickering lines inbetween the textures and concluded that this was because the UV?s weren?t lined up properly, which could be easily fixed later. In fact it seems to be due to the fact that I only combined the four quarters and didn?t merge them. So the flickering is the central edges sitting on top of eachother, where the seams of the textures also lay.
I tried merging all the edges and this has subsequently warped the textures, but seemed to fix the flickering. I think that I?m probably going to have to re do the UV?s, now that I have merged the edges.
Thanks again Aven
I wish I could help, but fear not, Aven to the rescue...
[:D]