I am trying to create a scene where I have some everyday houses in it. (to show of some window designs etc etc).
I can find various 3ds models free on the web (working on a low budget ).
I can bring them into cheetah 3D on the mac and convert them to import into Unreal. The problem is the models come into cheetah 3D without the materials applied so it is a lot of work to correct this and the other problem is there are variuos material applied to one surface. Also the materials are not named so its a guessing game as to what fits where.
One example is here : Building N120614 - 3D model (*.3ds) for exterior 3d visualization. | Buildings and Houses This is perfect for what I need.
So the big question from this new 3D man is.
Is there a way for me do bring some models into Unreal that will have their materials attached and working ?
Or is the 3D world not that simple. ie do I have to create the materials within Unreal and manually apply them to each object.
This would depend on how the modeling software handles materials and exports them with the FBX.
Even then, it will only bring some of the materials over to plug into a material created with the import.
For example,
In 3Ds Max when I create a model if I were to use a material and export that with my FBX it will only bring in the Diffuse, Specular, and Normal Map.
Specular is not really needed with PBR materials so you would still need to go into the Material and further set it up to get the best results by using values for the Roughness and Metallic.
The best option is to manually setup your materials were possible for the best result.
sing Blender (which is free), you can UV map them and the textures will work. I’ve been creating and importing assets for weeks now and never had a single issue. Just export (.fbx) - import - apply materials. It all works flawlessly so far. Characters are a different issue though.
This is a good one to look at to give you an idea of how to make something feel like it has “life.”
There is a good balance of light on the interior to make it not feel overly bright along with simple assets. Using the directional light to cast some lighting information for the interior also breathes a little bit of life into the scene.
Once you get some more assets (possibly migrate some of the living room items from the Realistic Rendering demo over to your scene if you need assets) and start tweaking lighting you should be off to a good start.
Lighting is indeed important but it’s sort of ‘hit or miss’. There’s no formula per se, you just have to do it. Fortunately, for a game, it is pretty straight forward (as opposed to animation). You basically put lights where they would be in the real world. If you want to add more in order to alter the mood you can but keep in mind that it’s not a film. A film is rendered and therefore lighting has no impact on the final viewer’s experience. A game is basically generated on the fly so the lighting will have an impact on the playability. I would say that textures are more important for giving a scene life. Models as well. A coffee table with scratches and a pile of magazines for instance.
I looked at the link but it does not show what is placed where (I have posted a question there).
I am struggling with the basic concepts. See attached image.
Apart from know which lights to place where I have the following problems that I don’t know where to start solving.
The canopies above the door. These have been imported from a free web site. When I build lights I get an errors stating :
Error WoodStock1300--Legs-for-Picture Object has wrapping UVs.
Info WoodStock1300--Legs-for-Picture Lightmap UV are overlapping by 93.0%. Please adjust content - Enable Error Coloring to visualize.
I followed a thread that stated turn on use error colouring to show where the problem is but I have turned this on but don’t see anything.
The canopies have a strange reflection showing in the white areas (this has my material UPVCWhite applied)
I have created a basic material called UPVCWhite (screenshot attached). This is used on the following: (Looking at the left hand house.) The door & frame and bottom window. (these are existing prop SM_Door_Frame SM_Door & SM_windowFrame) The 2 top window frames (these are built up of a 3D model imported).
The downstairs door , frame & window all look like they should (UPVC material) but the upstairs are darker…
Looking at the object it’s definitely got some unwrap issues going on for the UV. This can cause the lighting/shadowing error your seeing with the mesh. There are two options here. You will need to create a second UV for the mesh for proper shadows to be baked or you need to use movable (dynamic) lighting to not use baked shadow information with Lightmaps. The first option will give you better results with shadows but will require some work to get it right with the UV.
Correcting the lightmaps or using movable lights will take care of this.
This is probably, again, related to the UV layout. If there are overlapping faces for this mesh the lightmap will bake shadow information on the wrong faces. This is why it is important for the objects to have correctly setup lightmap UVs to prevent this from happening.
As a side note, you may find that a lot of the models grabbed from sites like Archive3D and TurboSquid are not necessarily setup for game-ready use. There are often times where there of significantly more polys used than needed. There are Ngons in the models that can create unwanted effects. In general, they will need significant cleanup to really use in most cases.
Feel free to keep on with the questions if you have them. I don’t mind helping!
