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In my specific use case, I generally want most of the map geometry to just use flat shading, but then I'll have something like a pipe or column where I want the sides to be smooth. This would be very easy with smoothing groups, since I'd only need to use them on these specific brushes. Right now, I just have a 40 degree threshold set, so stuff like pipes gets smoothed automatically, but then some angled walls get smoothed as well when I don't want them to. There is a way to bypass this by having the faces of the wall spread between different objects, but situations where this is a practical workaround are very rare.

I generally assumed that there's probably some major hurdle with the smoothing, so I'm not surprised that there's no simple solution. But this is essentially the one feature that I think the plugin could still benefit from, since the lack of control over the shading is a pretty noticeable limitation. And yeah, I know I could just export the meshes to Blender and adjust the shading there, but this kind of defeats the purpose of using HammUEr in the first place. Everything else can be done using just Hammer and the UE editor and this would be the one outlier.

In my experience, you need to do quite a bit of grouping in Hammer before importing your map, otherwise the default culling can't keep up with all the separate parts. Keep in mind that every brush you import is both a new static mesh actor and a new asset, so optimisation goes out the window if you just import everything separately.

Thank you for the update; I didn't mean to come off as impatient or anything like that - it's just that I rely heavily on HammUEr for a major project and the fact that I couldn't use the full precision UV import feature you added at my request without breaking texture exporting was rather frustrating. After some quick testing, I can confirm that both features work properly in the new release - and what a time saver this is!

I assume you'll probably want to move away from UE4 at this point anyway (I have considered migrating my project to UE5, but decided against it), so I'll understand if this is the last update for the old engine. However, if you were to continue development for it, there is one last feature that, having spent a lot of time with my HammUEr workflow, I think would be extremely useful: smoothing group import. The angle threshold-based smoothing is not terrible, but I do find it rather limiting. Being able to import smoothing groups from Hammer would eliminate this problem; however, I realise that if this were an easy thing to implement, you probably would have done it already. I just wanted to put it out there that this feature would make the plugin absolutely perfect in my eyes, and I imagine others would concur.

Anyway, thanks again for the fix (I've spotted some of the new options here and there and they are also appreciated) and merry Christmas.

I don't think NT Entertainment is working on this plugin anymore. The latest 4.27.2 version doesn't work properly either. The only way I was able to get a hold of him in the past was through some knockoff Twitter platform which has been, unsurprisingly, shut down already.

Hi, sorry to bother you again, but it appears I've run into an issue that seems to be new to the updated version of the 4.27 release - the one where you improved the UV precision.

All the VTF files I export from textures in Unreal turn out unusable now - VTFEdit says they're corrupted. I'm using the exact same pipeline I did before, exporting to DXT-5, making sure that the resolutions are correct and so on. The name of the updated release is "New VTF Lib", so I assume you've made some changes to the VTF import/export process. Either I need to change my settings in some way I haven't figured out, or the exporting is unfortunately indeed broken.

Edit: After reverting to the "Back To School" release I was using before and leaving the settings unchanged, exporting textures works again. Looks like it really is a problem with the "New VTF Lib" release.

I've done some quick testing and it looks like everything works the way it should. Checking the new box appears to ensure that nothing is misaligned or warped anywhere. Thanks a lot for adding this and, while I will be sticking to this version, I imagine others may appreciate it if you implemented this in any future releases.

No problem - this is very important to me, but it is not very urgent at all. I definitely think it should be fixed, but as far as I'm concerned, there's no big hurry - so by all means, please take all the time you need. I hope your health improves soon.

I've tried the "use full precision UVs" option and yep, it fixes ALL the alignment issues I've described - including the warping, so now you can have faces of just about any shape (I haven't tested n-gons much, but all quads and tris are fine now) and everything aligns nicely between different faces and across separate meshes. As far as I can see, as long as this option is selected, the textures in UE match what you see in Hammer with absolute perfection.

Like you said, it's quite a nuisance to apply this to each mesh separately; in my case, it would be feasible, but I'd just... really rather not do it. I understand that applying this option to every single mesh would presumably have some impact on performance/memory, but I think it's absolutely worth it for me. So if you could indeed make HammUEr do this automatically during import, I'd be immensely thankful for it. Maybe it should be optional, but I'd always leave it on anyway.

I've been doing some more testing and while I'm still not 100% sure about this, I think my hunch about distance from the map centre being a factor may have been correct. In parts of the map that are closer to the origin, the texture alignment seems way better. It's still a bit off on some really narrow faces, but in 90% or so of cases it looks pretty spot on.

If I copy the same textured brush to different parts of the map, then import them, it seems like the texture offset indeed gets worse the further away it is from the centre. Again, I can't confirm it with complete certainty, but I'm quite convinced this could be the source of the problem.

Sorry if I used cohost incorrectly - frankly, I've never heard of it before. Just wanted to get in touch in case you don't check in here anymore, as this is very important to my project.

I'm using HammUEr 2.2 for UE4.27.2. I create maps in Hammer++ (standard HL2 config), so I import them as vmf files.

Regarding the texture warping, I think I have it partially figured out - it seems that faces that aren't rectangles or triangles (even if they're still neat quads) have a chance of being warped to various degrees. The bigger issue is that putting different shapes next to each other can yield slight discrepancies in the texture scale/alignment, which can become increasingly obvious if they're part of, say, one big floor:

I assume this is still due to the geometry not being simple rectangles and triangles everywhere, but making everything so neat requires a lot of additional vertices, and it's unfortunate that a tradeoff like this needs to be made. Still, this is relatively minor compared to the real issue:

Sometimes, textures are just misaligned for seemingly no reason, even on simple rectangles on basic planes (slanted surfaces might make this worse, but I'm not sure). I can copy the exact same mesh to a different location, import both and get different texturing on both of them. Other times, the texture is just clearly off by a large amount:

This becomes a serious problem on small geometry (say, a 2-6 hu wide beam), where you can end up with the completely wrong part of a texture being visible.

I've checked to see if this is affected by brush grouping, texture alignment options (world/face alignment and decimals in the offset) - nope. I kind of feel like this issue has got worse over time, but I don't know what that means - is it the increasing offset from the center of the map as I build outwards? I can copy a brush that was imported correctly before to a different part of the map and get the issue there. I should also point out that my Hammer textures are just proxies and they have a different size (powers of 2, as opposed to more random values in UE - so my real UE texture may be 200x200, while the Hammer version will be 256x256), but I've tried replacing the UE textures with ones of the same size as the Hammer proxies, and the offset was the same, so I'm pretty sure it's not the conversion between sizes that's the problem.

As for import settings, my scale conversion factor is 41 and I'm not using any of the experimental or legacy options, though I have tried most of them, with no change.

The "good" news is that I most certainly can replicate the problem. I don't know what causes it, but once it's there for a face, it's there for good. I can get rid of it sometimes by changing the offset to some arbitrary different value, but that's about it. I'd like to send you a chunk of my map so you could see the examples I showed yourself, but I don't know how to do it here, as all the textures are fully custom.

Thank you for responding so promptly and I hope we can work this out - other than this one issue, this tool has been immeasurably helpful and it's just that one problem preventing it from being perfect for my needs.

Hi, I've been using your tool for my game and there's one issue I keep running into. A lot of the time, textures become misaligned after being imported - sometimes the offset is really big; other times, the whole texture becomes visibly warped (so it's aligned properly on one end of a face, but then it's off on the other side). I've been unable to determine what this is caused by, since it doesn't seem to happen all the time. Sometimes it gets really bad and I still can't tell why.

If this is an unknown issue, I can provide screenshots, comparisons and so on.

Thanks for the reply, but it turned out the problem was my fault. I didn't realise the materials I was trying to export used textures that didn't comply with Source's resolution requirements (they weren't powers of 2). I just had to resize the textures and now everything works fine. On a side note, the manual states that thumbnails in Hammer's texture browser don't work, but they actually do work just fine. The only issue I've noticed so far while working with the tool is that textures on really thin faces (2 units wide or so) get a little broken when imported to UE - part of the texture seems to disappear, leaving a small "gap" near the edge of the face.

I'm having trouble getting the texture export from UE4.27 to Hammer to work. All the materials just end up showing up as the missing texture chessboard in Hammer.