I have a project that has been created in some Engineering software (similar to Revit) exported into 3DS Max and then I have applied materials to everything.
I am now looking at exporting this into Unreal Engine, I exported from Max as an .FBX and tried to import it into Unreal:
First issue was that it imported 6000 (just under) objects, which took nearly an hour. Can I group objects together to speed this up?
Second Issue: As soon as it completed the import, it did an Autosave and it need to update out of date objects, which took another hour.
Finally: Will the materials applied in Max come through in Unreal?
I must have been doing something wrong, somewhere along the line.
materials applied in max should come through to UE4 but probably wont look as they did in max, Max’s materials aren’t physically based, UE4s are.
You can disable auto save or at least change its frequency, so that should solve that issue, (or just cancel it when it pops up) Google it and you get a few results.
If you are importing 6000 objects…that’s a lot!
What are they?
Are they all (or some) the same object repeated? in which case just bring one in and duplicate in UE4
Or are they all different. In which case im seriously curious to know what your bringing in here? i mean 6000!?!?
A screen shot of what you are trying to achieve would be useful.
Gutted about the materials though, I spent some time creating/applying them for some renders which I did using mental ray (using Arch and design materials).
For this project I was hoping to use the sequencer to get a flythrough done but if i’m going to have to rebuild a lot of the model and re-do all materials it’s probably not looking likely for this project.
If you have your locations and instances set up in Max you can export all of it to an FBX file, when it imports to UE4 it will only import one object for the instance and then it will create a Blueprint of the scene which you can drop into the level and it will have the placements and copies of objects all set up.
Also, in the import options, make sure to disable things like Automatic Lightmap Generation and Automatic Collision Generation–these things will greatly increase the amount of time it takes to import. In your case you don’t need collision, and the lightmap generation doesn’t work well anyways.
As far as materials go–rarely do the more complex types of materials export from one program to another, so to get a material from 3ds Max to UE4 you must use the Standard material type.
Epic is currently working on a tool (Project ‘Nile’) that will be a one-click solution that converts MR and Vray materials along with the whole scene over to UE4.
I’ve started to break the original model down into smaller fbx files and grouping similar objects seems to work well.
I followed darthviper’s advice and imported the scene, which works well. The only issue i now have is that when i import it, everything around the import goes black? I kinda figured it would import into the nice sky area with the grid?
If you mean the environment sky goes away, I think what you can do is then save the content in the content browser and then make a new scene with the default sky and then there should be a blueprint in the content browser of the scene that you can drop into the level and that’ll place the objects again (if you used the Blueprint option)
I don’t think it should be an issue if you use many FBX scenes, like doing it for individual buildings probably should be fine.
If it is a complete scene, with all the parts already in their correct places in max and you wont be interacting with it (i.e picking stuff up and moving it around during run time), you could just combine them ALL into a single object and import that into UE4. If all you are doing is a fly through/walk around in UE4 i can’t see any harm in doing that? You’ll have to make some collision meshes, but that shouldn’t take long at all.
I honestly have no idea if UE4 can import M-Ray materials, and if it can, i have no idea how good/bad they will work. Best bet is to give it a try.
I know that V-Ray Materials are fairly easy to translate if that helps.
You shouldn’t build whole scenes inside your modeling software. You should model objects separately, rooms separately, and piece everything altogether inside the engine.
You should separate the meshes then (as much as possible) and import them separately. It can take forever to import some stuff inside the engine and large scenes are part of it.
There’s a couple of issues with making it into a single mesh–first is lighting, you can only use a single lightmap per object so if you combine them all you won’t be able to get enough detail in the lightmap. If you use dynamic lighting then that’s not a problem but if you have interiors then dynamic lighting will look bad.
The other thing is performance, while you might be just doing an animation or image render, you probably want to work at a reasonable speed, and making it a single mesh would have very poor performance.
The FBX Scene Import option is meant to allow you to arrange your scene in your 3D program and have it maintain the positions and the instancing that you have, so it’s equal to importing individual objects and then placing them yourself, except now you can do it in your 3D program.
Hi guys, I did so many stuff like exporting from 3ds max to UE4… But I recommend .OBJ instead of .FBX… It’s way better than .FBX in UE4 and quite faster to export I think!!.. and If you want to break down Polys, You can try “ProOptimizer” modifier in 3ds Max or You try Mixamo’s Decimator () it’s good too in breaking down the PolyCount… Hope this helps!!
Once I have imported a FBX scene and all of my objects are in the content browser, how do I then place the objects individually using the blueprint so they all appear in the correct place?