I want to make a custom texture for the HeroTPP character model that’s included with the Third Person project templates.
Is there any easy way to extract the UV mapping so I know how to create my texture?
I believe there is no UV mapping at all, as it’s simple colored material w/o any textures applied to the character.
.fbx sources are available somewhere on the wiki, you might find the link in one of the first videos about creating third-person game.
Hope this helps, regards.
There is uv mapping.
Just right click at skeleton mesh inside editor and export mesh as .fbx, I think you will figure out what to do next
Thanks mate. Opening the exported .fbx file in a modeling program now to extract the UV mapping.
I noticed one can choose to see the UV mapping within Unreal Editor (Show>Advanced>UV) but it just applies like a overlay to the screen and I have no idea how to extract it further.
Hi Wollan,
As you pointed out you can view the UV within Unreal in the skeletal mesh viewer by going to Show > Advanced > UV. This will overlay it on the screen to show you how it is used within that space. This is more to quickly assess how the UVs are being viewed within the editor rather than edit them.
You can find the HeroTPP character skeletal mesh within the Content Browser and when you right-click you can export this to an FBX file which you can then use to open in your 3D software. For me, since I use 3Ds Max I would then apply a UVW Unwrap modifier to the mesh to view the UV layout that you were able to see in UE4.
From there you can render an image of the UV layout to an image format of your choosing that you can open in your image editor of choice to paint and apply textures to that UV template.
To make this easier and to give other users a chance to create some textures for their player characters if they’d like I’ve taken the liberty of doing this for you and other users to use.
Attached you will find a zip file that contain the following:
HeroTPP saved as 3Ds Max 2010 (Skeletal Mesh has been removed) with the color coding I applied to various body parts.
A rendered template image of the UV Layout for editing the texture
A rendered texture of the color coding I’ve applied to the UVs for easier correlation to specific body parts
A rendered image of the character with the applied color coding.
I’m attaching the images here so users can see what the above refers to.
I hope this helps you and users like you have fun with the template! 
Thank you!
Tim
Download Link to .zip file with templates and 3ds file](Dropbox - File Deleted)
That is amazing community service. Appreciate the effort here!
Perfect timing as well as I was out for a meeting and the last thing I did was to simply export the char asset to .fbx. You saved me some work here.
No problem!
Figured this could be something that everyone, those new and seasoned could use if they wish.
Tim
Very cool Tim! Thank you. This helps. Now if I can only learn to do all of that myself… I don’t have the luck of access to 3ds max or maya at the moment… Am I pretty screwed in terms of using my own models in this engine? I do have: Zbrush, rhino 3d, and blender though so hopefully those are suitable?
Those are absolutely suitable. Blender is/should be capable of doing any of the UV map layouts and being able to make a texture template so you can export. I didn’t really do anything other than that. Going through and marking the pieces for color coding to know what is where on the UV map was what took the longest.
I’m not really familiar with Rhino aside from knowing about. I’ve never really looked the program. Zbrush is great but it it been a steep learning curve for me. I started with Mudbox in school. While Max and Maya both have a large amount of feature sets the basics of modeling can still be achieved in Blender. Using some of the modifiers in Max can help me achieve a look faster. This is something I’m not sure if it’s possible in Blender or not. I’ve not got a lot of experience with it. I’m slowly picking up some things here and there with it since it is a big part of the community here!
Nice…
Question: Is this the actual 3ds Max source of HeroTPP or an export/import of the UE4 version?
You cannot export to 3ds from the engine, so this appears to be a source file.
You cannot export directly to 3Ds Max but you can export to FBX and import that into 3Ds or whatever modeling program supports FBX.
This was a simple export of the skeletal mesh of the HeroTPP from UE4. I do not have access to the source files these were made from. I simply exported the mesh to FBX > imported to Max
After importing I deleted the rig as I did not need it for what I intended to do. I only wanted the mesh so that I could render the UV Template and assign colors to the individual body parts for easily seeing what correlates to specific UV islands on the UV template.
I provided the Max file in the event anyone wanted to look at it since I had changed it anyway. Nothing really special about it.
Tim
Hi,
I am trying to use an existing UE4 character asset and came accross your post. Hope you don’t mind I have a few questions. I exported the mesh as fbx and opened in Maya. I noticed that the UV’s all overlap and am not certain why?
Thanks
Really just depends on the asset and how the UVs were laid out. If the materials being applied are separate IDs then the overlap won’t matter. If the material is a tiling material that doesn’t need to have specifically setup texture details the overlapping really won’t matter that much.
I suppose some of it’s just preference and some UVs where it’s not overlapping for others is used for specific detailing that is needed.