Leaf Cards disappearing when viewed from above or sides.

Hello! I am completely new to UE4 and game creation and was hoping someone could help with a couple of questions:

Also getting this error: http://i.imgur.com/M5QP4iR.jpg

First, As displayed in the above video I am having some issues with the cards used on my palm trees disappearing. I have tried aligning normals in Maya to the surface and have also averaged the normals. Neither of these made any difference. I tried switching the texture used on the palm with that on the fern and the same issue persists so I believe it is an issue with the model, not the textures. I also used the same process on the ferns that I did on the palms yet the ferns seem to be okay. As a note the palm functions within Maya and does not have this strange issue other than some slight clipping which I’m accustomed to with cards.

Unrelated question; For texture imports I keep getting the error that my texture is not divisible by two (1536x1536) saved as a 32 bit TGA. Why am I getting this error?

Thanks in advanced for helping a total noobie!

Thanks so much guys! Really appreciate it!

Thank you as well!

Hi Tarrtarus!

You may need to activate the “Two-Sided” property in the Details panel of your leaves material as well as “Use two sided Lighting” in the detail properties of your leaf cards if you are using Lightmass.

For the texture issue, your texture resolution should be a power of a two number (i.e 128x128, 1024x1024, 4096x2048, etc), (32bit Targa is fine if you are using the alpha channel for your alpha mask).

Leaf issue

The first issue is with the way backfaces are rendered in a game engine. Model faces only render the positive side of the normal. To fix this you can either duplicate the faces and flip the normal in your modelling program or you can just check the Two Sided checkbox in the material for your leaves. The material approach still only builds a single lightmap for the positive normal face so it works fine for leaves usually but not so much for more solid objects. To build proper lightmaps you need to do the first approach and fix it in Maya/Max/Blender.

Most 3D Modelling programs have an option to turn on Backface Culling to preview this.

Texture Error

The texture issue isn’t they it can’t be divided but that it must be a direct power of 2. This leaves you with these sizes only for textures:

2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096

Lightmap and null mesh errors

In your screenshot you have two issues.

The warnings abouta staticmesh with NULL staticmesh property means that you have an actor in the level (palmTree_10) with no mesh supplied for it to render. This is usually no real issue but just messy as it won’t render anything. You can just delete it or supply a mesh by clicking on it and setting the StaticMesh property to point to a viable mesh.

The error at the top of the message log is saying palmTree_10 has its lightmap resolution property set the 0 OR the material index you specified for its lightmap UVs does not actually exist. Remember that UV channels start from 0 not 1 so if you lightmap UVs are in the first channel that is 0, the second channel would be 1 and so forth.

There is a chance that error is caused just because the palmTree_10 staticmesh property isn’t set though so try removing the actor or putting a mesh in the StaticMesh property and see if it goes away.