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Exporting Metaball to alembic – phong/normal issue?
I’m working on a low poly triangulated sequence of matter pulling together for replay in Unity. The shot is exporting and working in Unity no probs, except that I’m losing the hard edges on my geometry. When I import the abc file back into C4d it’s the same, it’s like a forced phong on the geometry. I’m deselecting export normals too.
I can actually add a phong tag with 20 degrees to the resultant abc file, and it corrects it, but can’t seem to re-export it from there, I just end of with an empty file
Does anyone know of any additional quirks with metaball and abc?
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5 Replies
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I believe unity does tessellate an imported fbx what does you mesh look like?
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I’m using the new Unity alembic importer. The fbx import settings have a handy normal mapping feature that allow you to import, calculate or have none. None is what I need here but the alembic settings are quite restrictive.
The mesh in Unity looks identical to the mesh after reimport in C4d. One thing I noticed though is that I can click on the mesh in Unity and see the low poly wireframe, something that isn’t visible in c4d weirdly, it’s like the phong normal is baked onto the object even though I have everything deselected on export.
I’m thinking some special shader to force reject normals would be the work around, but I’ve no idea where to look for that.
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Can you post a screen shot of the mesh after its imported to unity?
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You can see the wireframe here
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ugh! I figured this out, slightly embarrassingly.
Mostly down to my ignorance of normals functionality, even though I kind of knew what they do. I was deselecting normals on export thinking that’s where the smoothing was occurring, but it was actually the lack of normals that made the mesh not know where the face edges were.
The alembic files grew about x6 times in size interestingly, but still very small
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