Whats with the hideous neck seam on my skeletal mesh?

Hey sons, I just imported a skeletal version of my character in the editor and was greeted with a hideous neck seam that only seems to be on the skeletal mesh. I’ve read that if you have overlapping UV’s that things’ll **** up, but those threads only specified static meshes(I think). So, can some magical nice man help towards a solution? Here are some caps.alt text

Hey Shajee -

I don’t think your UVs are a problem here as Skeletal Meshes are always lit dynamically. I would check one of two things which could be the root of the problem. First, and I have a tendency to do this from time to time myself, if you modeled your head separate from the body do your vertices match up along the neck line and I also mean do you have the exact same number go around the neck where the head and body join? If you have extra verts there or the verts don’t line up this would create a seam. Along the same lines, have you welded the verts along the same?

Check those and if those are not the problem still upload a screenshot of your wireframe that will help us continue to help you.

Thank You -

Eric Ketchum

Thanks for answering meng. As for my mesh, yes the verts in the head match up exactly with the ones on the body. I snapped the verts to each other, but did not weld them because won’t that corrupt my UV’s/confuse Unreal?(I have a separate map for the head). I’ll weld the verts to each other and see what’s up in the engine.

Thanks

If you can read this I accidentally posted twice.

Thanks for answering meng. As for my mesh, yes the verts in the head match up exactly with the ones on the body. I snapped the verts to each other, but did not weld them because won’t that corrupt my UV’s/confuse Unreal?(I have a separate map for the head). I’ll weld the verts to each other and see what’s up in the engine.

Thanks

If you can read this I accidentally posted twice.

Hey Shajee -

Yes welding would require a little bit of UV work. So lets check a few more things and see if we can’t get this problem fixed. You could try to edit the normals and tangents in your modeling program and have them flow correctly and then re-import your meshes and it should reduce the problem. Also check the normal map of your body and head and make sure that it is not set to SRGB, it shouldn’t be by default but its a good test.

You could also move the seam line so that it falls not at the neck but under the tank top straps which would hide any lighting problems on the skin from view, or add a scarf / choke collar over them seam.

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

Hmm… I guess I’ll try a racing jacket of some kind. Might be kinda cool, but first I think it’s time for some poly optimization/re-UVing because when I welded the verts and tried to import, Unreal kinda exploded. I’ll try your way first though and hit you up when I’m done.

Thanks bro

■■■■’ son, I’m retarded. I should have told unreal NOT to calculate normals and IMPORT the ones I had in the FBX file. I did all that welding/re UVing for nothing. Oh well, at very least, this’ll save of my Unreal 4 homies a headache.