I hope its not to late to post about this
Anyway, i dunno if anyone else has ever noticed...but the imported UT weps...the lighting that is cast on them...is like so much better than any other meshes in the game...somehow the lighting is like real time on them.
I was wondering if we could make every mesh like monster and player meshes into the type of meshes that the UT weps use? :-?
both games use the same method to trace shadows on meshes, unreal and ut use gouraud shading for shadowing effects on meshes.
what you're talking about is the infamous bug which "breaks" meshes when you export and import them with wotgreal/utpt.
basically the exporter splits verticles up depending on the smoothing groups and uvw map, while this does give a better effect ingame (sharper looking shadows), it has a DEVASTATING effect on performance as the polycount is tripled in amount (due to aggressive splits).
the consequence of applying this method is: a 300 poly weapon model could visibly look the same (except for the shadows) however its polycount would reach in the 1200's
besides i should mention the shadowing effects caused by exporting are HIGHLY undesired on round organic meshes, it does not recognise smoothing/uvw very well and will often break smoothing between organic surfaces, causing tears among the mesh (particulary noticable on models with agressive LODPARAMS STRENGTH).
