Architectural advice

HI all
after i finish the hotel interior design ( i’ll attach some samples ) the owner wants to walk around the hotel like counter strike ( he said )
so Google says here is the solution
I watched some tutorials and it seems to me that the transition from max to unreal will be boring as hell and i will have to create every material from scratch
but if that’s the case so be it
i found couple of scripts for quick uv and quick export from max to unreal
my questions is :

If you’ve never used unreal, let me tell you, it’s going to be brutal…

I guess your hotel is a max model rendered with vray or similar?

1st : There is no way to convert materials, Unreal can import a standard diffuse texture only (max standard mat). You’ll have to build every mats from scratch. Of course UV mapping is going to be imported as well. That’s that!
2nd : Counter-strike in your hotel should work but…
3rd : You need lightmaps, that mean unwrapping each piece of geometry on channel 2 in max before importing. (steamroller script can do the job on 95% of objects imo)
4th : You’ll have to redo all the lighting setup. You cannot import lights from max.

It’s hard to evaluate the time you’re gonna need. If you learn unreal while doing this, it may take a bit longer. Nice project tho!

To give you an idea, I’m redoing Salk Institute with static lighting atm (previously used vxgi but meh) so it’s a big scene and it’s very playable even with a lot of geometry. Longest part was to detach meshes to assign a lightmap to each meshes in 3ds max. Then I use steamroller on nearly 1500 meshes. After that I drop everything in Unreal and apply my materials. Everything is mapped beforehand in max. I’m using default template sun/skylight/sky for now. I don’t use any export plugin. Unreal importer is doing a great job anyway.

One thing to remember, if you have many plane geometry (no thickness), this could be a problem because unreal cull backfaces and this will let light pass tru. It’s going to give you a ton of light leaks.

Good luck.

Beautiful renderings. Like you I do still renderings and wanted to learn UE4 to do simple animations. After 2 months of use I was able to do an interior to a descent level but not as good as my still renderings. Unreal does not behave the same as Vray for example and you will have a hard time matching the quality of your stills. Good luck should you take the plunge!

thanks for taking time to write this perfect answer
yes this is 3ds max 2016 and vray 3.2
i guess i can use ( VRayMtl Converter ) Script to covert the materials back into standard ( will that speed up the process ?)
i start to arrange the layer in 3d max and naming the objects , it took all day and i didn’t finish yet , so it is going to be brutal indeed
thanks for the last notice , most my floor and wall is one plane so i can add shell modifier ( will that be enough ? )

thank you
i don’t expect the renders to be as good as vray but there is great rendering i saw on youtube u will never guess it was done by unreal
check this out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nLGoqqDc0w
the main problem with the learning processfor me is time since we are two persons company so if we got new work we have to take it
we can only learn in between projects but i am already hooked so first i’ll learn the basics and complete this project

Converting to standard material can help but unreal will only import the diffuse texture tho!!!

It’s possible to make stunning materials with unreal! Glass with reflections can be tricky. Usually I fake it because it’s not the engine’s strong point right now. But fortunately I don’t see many glass surfaces and metallic surfaces in your scene. That’s a plus! haha

Does Substance Designer have a node that can convert Vray to PBR? It might only be PBR to VRay right now…

That might be another option. the price of the software could easily pay for itself after converting a few materials.

It will never reach the level of photo-realism of v-ray that’s 100% sure but I think the other advantages can make up for it (fast and cheap video making, live post-processing and easy VFX viewable in realtime, application making, etc) and there are always ways to fake stuff to look alllllmost as good as what offline ray-tracers can do.

The main disadvantage is reflections/refractions… It’s the most noticeable difference between a v-ray and unreal rendering right now I think. Fake reflections and I think most clients won’t even notice the non-perfectly physical reflections in the scene!!!

You can start by using the brand new free substances ressource site if you want to save some time on the materials in the future. Just install the substance plugin from the unreal marketplace and import the substance file and voila! Some mats are procedural and very tweakable!!!

Allegorithmic have a very nice model, pay to own… basically you pay 19,99$ per month until youhave paid your full license (less than 300$ if your company does less than 100k a year in revenues), then you own it forever!!! These are state of the art tools.

thank you … this is valuable information … i’ll take dive there

koooolalala is the best realistic render with UE and big problem is there are no TUT about this.

As said above, you will encounter some problems while transferring project from software rendering to real time rendering.
Also, game engines work extremely different from rendering software like mental ray or Vray and ect.
Another thing is that game engines usually use some fake or trick to balance the performance instead of achieve ultimate realism in rendering software.
The result is you will not get the same quality as rendering software provides you.
However, it is not possible and there are a lot of things you can do to make is look awesome.
Those are my opinions, I worked as architectural and interior designer since 2012.

He does great work. All the information is on the forum of how he works but that doesn’t mean you’ll have his artistic eye.

Is this process necessary for every object or just the main objects like outer wall ,ceiling and floor

Mostly walls, ceilings, floors - other stuff usually has multiple sides.

i am still in the process of converting the scene into unreal and the main problem by far is :

  • boolean and Proboolean objects need special care … any extra edge and u will get hafe object.
  • uvwrape with Tom’s Script on complex object like this picture will be stupid move , u have to do it patiently apart.
  • when export instanced objects with Tom’s Script u should use reset xform befor if local coordinate of the objects doesn’t match the world coordinate .
    now i got bored and moved to work with materials and i have two question :
  • what is the difference between instances and duplicated materials from architectural point of view .
  • and I need to know how to assign keyboard shortcut to **TextureSampleParameter2D ** since i will use it a lot .

one more question please
is there a way to modify my uvw map for the material ?
i know i can go back and modify and re import and it will replace automatically.
just want to know if there is another way .

You can do basic stuff easily like tiling, flipping and assign the channel with a texturecoordinate node :

it’s possible to rotate a texture too with a customrotator node but I’ve never really used it before!!!

thank you
but i meant to modify on object level .