Hello!
I would like to be able to send my scene straight from 3DS Max to Unreal Engine through Datasmith, without having to replace each of the materials with the master material/material instances I have already created in UE. This would make things a lot faster for ArchViz projects.
The idea is when importing to UE, Datasmith would give the user the option of replacing the scene materials with a master material previously created by him/her. Then, all materials would be instances of that custom master material. As an example, Quixel Bridge already supports this kind of operation: all the user has to do is to name their TextureSample nodes following Bridge’s guidelines. By doing so, each texture is automatically assigned to its correct TextureSample. An integration with Quixel Bridge shouldn’t be a bad idea as well, in case this would make things easier.
If possible, this would be great to keep basic editions made in 3DS Max, such as tiling and maybe color correction (if not asking too much, these could be option boxes). The user could set up their master material in UE beforehand to account for those edits.
Datasmith is already a great tool, and if Epic could improve it by including these features, this would make ArchViz artist’s lives a lot easier and better organized.