Sorry, I know this question has been asked often, because I googled up pretty much every thread or answer hub post but nothing helped. Also read all official docs.
I’m experienced in C4D and not so much in UE4. I’m exporting in FBX 2013 of cause.
What I tried so far and didn’t work:
in FBX export settings: Textures and materials set, all possible variations of animation and embed textures on/off
applying a material (diffuse+normal) to mesh with UVW Projection or Cubic Projection set
applying a material to a poly selection
applying a material to a poly selection and naming both 1,2,3 etc. accordingly
all possible variations in the UE4 import settings, like Combine Mesh on/off etc.
In any case, the furthest I get is that it imports the mesh/meshes with the image textures. It creates an empty Material with a random vector color value.
Less of a problem; but if I scale the UVs in C4D to have let’s say a 25% scale for tiling, it does not respect that on the imported material.
That stuff doesn’t seem to work with the C4D FBX, its amongst a rather large number of FBX problems with UE4.
To be honest though once you have the link between the source FBX and Textures set up I prefer manually creating the Materials and hooking them up in UE4 anyway, especially as I use Material Instances applied to my Skel and Static Meshes, having it auto create a bunch of materials are you going to change anyway is no fun.
As for tiling you are either doing it in the Material/Material Instance or you could do it in the UV map in which case UE will import that fine.
Not sure if relevant, but my strategy with C4D has been to use bodypaint to automatically unwrap the UVs, paint it and then bake as much of it as I can into different passes and export them and build materials in UE.
I found that converting everything to mesh helps. Then you need to align your normals - anything with symmetry will have half the normals reversed. Often you lose the caps of lofts, etc. While I love spline-based modeling it comes with the cost of exporting being painful. The best way to deal with it is to do the mesh conversion step before you texture it.
I agree that in most cases you’d want to have dynamic material instances or certain tweaks anyway.
After having built assets the past few days I still think it’s a severe workflow inconvenience.
The way I experience it, is that if you build up a room with let’s say 50 different assets and 30+ materials with UE4 import in mind all you do is applying diffuse, specs and normals and if you could just port the whole room 1:1 into UE4, there won’t be unexpected surprises except for maybe lighting conditions. While building the level in C4D you already can pretty much exactly tell how things will look if imported as they are. Sure, you would then go in and create more advanced instances for apparent, big objects of interest like a floor. But you certainly wouldn’t tweak the hell out of a small lamp somewhere in the corner. At this point you will be just fine with diffuse+specs+normals and all you’d do is maybe adding a node or two for roughness or whatnot.
With multiple rooms and at the end of the day maybe hundreds of small assets that don’t need highly advanced material setups it saves hours and hours of work.
While I’m at it. Is it possible to save out or access captured reflection maps? Currently while building levels I’m just taking 4-5 high FOV screenshots of the level, stitch them together, create a fake 32bit .exr and light my C4D scene with it to be able to texture under similar lighting conditions to be able to hit color keys more closely. Would be a lot nicer to have a 360 map straight out, even better in hdr.
For capturing the cube yes, this is quick and dirty but I made a new BP based on actor and added the SceneCaptureCube component to it. Then in the Project Browser make a new Texture/Cube Render Target.
Hook this up to your capture component. Then place the BP in the scene, press play and stop and the cube is rendered out, you can then right click and export it.
You could do some graph stuff, maybe bluetilities to do the render when pressing a button etc. but this like I said is quick and dirty.
