Big News - "Project Nile" 3ds Max Eporter Plugin

Hi guys, I have great news for you!
Yesterday I was in Venice and attended the first conference on the world’s immersive architecture that took place in Venice http://www.im-arch.com/. Among the illustrious participants was also Ken Pimental, Epic’s Senior Product Manager. His work was titled “VR in Cultural Heritage” and among the various slides appeared the image you see and referred to an unknown “Project Nile”, a plugin to export to Unreal by 3ds Max and other modelers.
At the end of the interview some questions to the guest… to the question about the details of the project he replied “I was afraid to ask me this question!”. Laughter in the room. “What I can say is that in beta test” the answer.
The news is exciting if the plugin will confirm itself as a blast conversion timer.
What should we expect as functionality from this new resource?
I hope in some more news from developers :slight_smile:

It’ll be nice to learn more about this. I remember some people working on tools for UDK where you could work in your 3D program and then instantly pass your assets to UDK and even match the viewport that you had, something like that would be super useful.

What is the ETA for this? Looking forward to it.

So Project Nile is something like the crytools plugin for 3dsMax to Cryengine, right ?
Would be really nice to have something like this for UE4… The whole exporting and importing progress is kinda anoying…

Where can I download this plugin? Very need! Thank you!

Project Nile is still in research mode. I should have assumed it would make it’s way onto this forum.

Project Nile is focused on workflow into UE4. It isn’t one thing, it is many things. The picture shows moving data via a one-click workflow of an entire scene (cameras, materials, lights, instances, pivots, etc.) into UE4. It already works, that is not a mockup image. I think that was originally a rendered test scene that we brought over with a single import step.

This is not the entire story. Watch for sneak peeks as we move forwards. You’ll see more at EUE in Utrecht, on our upcoming webinar (6/20) and Mundos Digitales.

Thanks for the update, Ken! Definitely very excited about using something like this in our workflow.

That’s interesting. As I understand anyway you should have your scene optimised and unwrapped already for this to work
I believe this is a connection, which transfers the assets.
A while ago I made a research about 3dsmax remote functions, will not be surprised if this project uses the same thing.
Very cool to see the development towards this direction!

We actually do auto-unwrapping and auto-bitmap conversion plus other things. But, some objects will require artist generated UVs (soft goods generally).

It is not a “live link” at this time. It requires a 3ds Max/Maya plug-in and an UE4 importer plugin.

As a 3D modeler with architectural visualization as one of my key work loads, I am eagerly anticipating this! I have developed my own workflow getting things into UE, but it’s in no way a linear process. Further development of UE in this direction will vastly expand their market. I’ve shared some of my work with my other architecture colleagues and they are already blown away at the quality, and real time results. You guys are truly leading the charge on all things virtual, in my humble opinion. Keep making waves!

Just amazing… this needs to be released asap… :cool::smiley:

Thank you Ken! Your intervention has been clarifier.
We look forward to more news from Mundos Digitales and to seeing the plugin at work in a near future.
Personally I would like one of the plugin features to recognize the resolution of the second map channel (3ds max) and import it directly into the lightmap resolution of the static mesh setting. It would save a lot of time in importing new assets like walls, floors and ceilings.

We are working on auto-resolution of light maps based on size of mesh. Small objects should have a small lightmap and vice versus.

Very interesting!:smiley:

finally guys!!

many thx

Did I mention Vray proxy support? Yup, check the box.

what about lightmaps? you know it’s a real headache :o

Can you be more specific?

Not that i’ll be trying to import my 30million+ poly tree :wink:

Use Forest Pro and we bring in as foliage instances.