TresCom Forums

Hi again, over the months I’ve been learning more about Unreal and modelling in general. I kind of bit off more than I could chew with exporting an entire level into Unreal, so have taken a break from it. So I’ve been playing around putting just the InGen Town section into Unreal as a little testing ground.

I’ve managed to fix a lot of the model importing problems by normalising normals with Blender first, so that’s not a problem anymore. The engine still hates the way transparency works with Trespasser’s textures, so I’ve been working around that. Even with Alpha channels a blue line is left around the texture.

I was wondering how best to do the vegetation. I feel Trespasser’s natural environments have a unique look to them, that’s hard to replicate with Unreal Store assets. But Trespasser’s leaves use of transparency would be hard to navigate. Then with store assets you can have wind blowing through the trees to make it feel a little more alive.

But anyway, I’m just plodding on and working on each issue as it appears.

Looks interesting. I guess the Town is both more easy to port as well as difficult.

As for the transparent textures. I am unsure how a Trespasser imported into Blender acts. I guess you have to reapply all textures if you change the texture itself? Otherwise you should be able to modify a transparent texture to act like how they do it now.

Thanks, managed to get it working. I opened the texture in Photoshop and set the blue to transparent, saved it as a png. and manually placed it onto the model in Unreal.

Not sure how I feel about the trees, of all the models I’ve imported, the trees and leaves seem stick out, with the gaps in the models and the 2D leaf clumps.

JohnDecodes wrote:Not sure how I feel about the trees, of all the models I’ve imported, the trees and leaves seem stick out, with the gaps in the models and the 2D leaf clumps.

You will notice that on a lot of the foliage. It is very likely the result of reducing faces/polys on the models back in the day. On some trees, you can clearly see it appears to have been branches at some point. I'd personally say to fix that stuff if you got the skill. I plan on doing that in the Isla Sorna project in the future.

Try manually editing the tree textures to have black instead of blue for the transparency color. And there might be a way to make it mask the texture instead of using an alpha? idk.

Looks interesting. You can use these upscaled textures as well if they're any use.
https://www.trescomforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11472

This looks pretty good. What a difference modern lighting makes on its own! I'd like to see it with 3D grass added as I find this always tends to tie everything together very nicely.

I do agree about the trees, the branches could probably use an update and some smoothing to the trunk would make it a bit less boxy. There should also be a way to add wind deformation on the leaves as part of Unreal's engine capabilities without having to use store assets.

Very nice.

Neat progress. I wish to add - your models appear to all use a single "smoothing group". This means, they are treated as an integrated smoothed surface as far as lighting goes. Individual areas need to be specified somehow as being together or apart, for proper smoothing appearance. I'm not too familiar with Blender I'm afraid.

Hey Drac, thanks for pointing this out and explaining it. For the longest time I thought everything looked oddly ‘soft’ and ‘hazy’ but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Looking in Unreal confirms what you thought, the .objs imported are missing smoothing data. It’s probably from converting the meshes. I export out 3DS from TresEd then convert to OBJ to import into Unreal.

Not sure what to do. I may have found a bit of a workaround, if I recalculate the Normal maps for each object in Unreal, it automatically generates new smoothing data. Objects that once had a soft shadow, now have a more dynamic shadow with differing depth depending on the Suns location and shape of the object. Certainly looks better, not sure if it’s a solution though. I’ll keep looking into it.

Been experimenting with generating terrain in Unreal from the retail levels height maps. Doing it this way instead of importing the terrain as a 3DS model lets me manipulate and sculpt the terrain in Unreal. The lighting still needs some work, and still not sure what to do with the vegetation.

Also been working on the Summit because it seemed the best area to explore terrain sculpting.

If you are interested this is the heightmap I converted for the deathmatch map. I converted from a tpm to a heightmap. It seems pretty close to the original. 16 bit accuracy.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/0r45vmvj ... 4.zip/file

Thanks for this, I’ll take a look.

Looks good!
As for the vegetation. I'd say you don't need to copy exactly how IT has it. You could place a lot of scratch where it make sense.

I realize now that the terrain is actually 4096^4096, so that heighmap is useless... sorry for the mistake.