I’m looking to bring an interior space from 3ds Max to Unreal Engine - it isn’t very big, but I’m struggling to find an efficient method that doesn’t waste time.
Right now each room is one model: floors, walls, ceiling, and window frames are all sharing the same UV sheet. This is helpful for exporting from 3ds Max because it means I have less assets to manage in UE, but conversely it makes applying materials in Unreal Engine impossible because I can’t select specific elements of each room (only the walls, for example). As it appears to me, I have two options:
Break down the rooms even further in 3ds Max and export each element separately - this will create more assets to manage, but I’ll be able to apply materials easier in Unreal Engine.
Keep treating each room as a single asset and create unique texture sheets for each room - this will take more time, but I’ll have less assets to manage overall.
I’m here looking for any advice, tips, or tricks that the community might have that could help me navigate this situation. I’m convinced there’s an easier way but I’m struggling to find it.
I would separate the walls/ceiling/floor to separate meshes, keep the walls split off by room but combine all of the floors and combine all of the ceilings. It’ll be a bit easier to work with the materials and since each object gets a single lightmap it will work better for your lighting.
Also, I see there you have a couple doorways with arches, instead of having those edges going straight up like that try and connect them to the corners of the walls to make a cleaner mesh.
Also look into using the FBX Scene Import option: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Content/FBX/FullScene/index.html
It allows you to export everything at once and when you import to UE4 it will maintain the proper pivots of each object and maintain the instancing so you don’t have object duplicates and it will have the option to create a Blueprint of the scene that contains the locations of where everything goes. That way you can place instanced objects like doors and windows where you need to and get their positions to accurately match up in UE4.
Epic is currently working on a one-click tool that will convert the full scene and make it even easier
