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Baking Vray Textures for use in Unreal

Development Discussion Architectural and Design Visualization
#1

Hi all,

I’m about 2 weeks new to Unreal and have been having some great fun. I’ve been working on turning a scene we’ve rendered with Vray into a scene in Unreal.

As you can imagine it’s quite impossible to make an Unreal scene look like a Vray render, even worse is that we use many colour corrects and complex materials in 3DS Max and Vray.

I have however been baking textures inside of Max and Vray that import into Unreal quite nicely, passes like Complete, Diffuse, Highlights and so forth work well enough in Unreal.

My question is though, as I’m so very new, does anybody see any large problems with this? I understand lighting and shadows will be baked into the Complete baked maps but I don’t see it being too much of a problem as long as the scene in Unreal is ambient lit well enough and certain lights match up when need be.

It’s a somewhat long winded process, unwrapping objects, projecting and baking but I can automate the baking so it can be sent off over night so the render time isn’t much of a worry, I just fear there’s something I’m not seeing that makes this whole process a bit useless?

I’m happy to elaborate if need be and very keen to see what you think.

#2

Hi, just wait for datasmith to be released…im sure it will tackle every problem you have right now in a few clicks with great results…its a game changer…

#3

The issue with baking something like a completemap is that the reflections will be baked in for that camera view so if you’re changing the camera view or doing an animation then they won’t be changing. What is more ideal is to bake separate maps like diffuse/metallic/roughness/normal and then you would build your lighting in UE4 which would then allow it to be more dynamic with reflections and lighting.
The Datasmith plugin can help with this, though it’s more efficient if you can bake your materials to simple maps rather than using many material nodes to get the results you want, it can convert Vray materials but it would make a pretty complex material to try and represent some of the stuff you can do in 3ds Max.

#4

artur77, I’ve been using Datasmith, it does a great job. I’m sure we’re not allowed to talk specifics outside of the forum but my issue isn’t with Datasmith here, more with matching the render as closely as possible, quite literally sticking the render on geometry :stuck_out_tongue:

#5

darthviper107

That’s good then, I understand the complete map will cause those problems and have been rendering out the other maps to build inside of Unreal if need be. As I mentioned above my problem is not with Datasmith here, it’s very powerful, it’s more to do with the complex materials we have in Vray that do not translate over easily, it’s not Datasmith, it’s me :slight_smile:

Either way it’s good to know then that this somewhat long winded and soon to be outdated method is still viable and not a waste of my time then, if anything I’d much prefer this till these “one click solutions” make it pointless.

#6

If you’re baking everything to completemaps then honestly you don’t need to take it to UE4, you could just keep it in 3ds Max and set everything to use a Standard material with a self-illumination material and render with the scanline renderer and get better anti-aliasing than what you could get with UE4 and it’d still be very quick to render.
You’re going to get better lighting from Vray, but it’s not going to be as dynamic if you bake everything that way.

#7

That’s it really, we’re just using Unreal for the realtime VR and changing colours/textures for the clients.