HammUEr, a Hammer/Worldcraft map importer for Unreal Engine

[Pirate]

This just broke my brain…

sooooo goood.

[Castle]

hmm very tempting to request the Quake 1 version of Aerowalk for the advanced FPS template I am doing. I think it will be best to build it from scratch though.

[JoeWintergreen]

@CyberDev;443258

Haven’t seen much info about the power of BSP in this thread, as someone who has investigated things like sketchup to save time modeling, would you say Hammer is a pretty good tool to get comfortable with for prototyping and even finalized environments? Or would quake be better? Or the source 2 version of hammer?

I mean this importer was made to be used more than to just re-play old maps right? I currently use maya 2016 & zbrush/3dcoat but it seems like bsp is easier for some things?

Yep! For now I recommend Hammer, the version you’d use to make Half-Life 2 maps, because HammUEr exports your UE materials (if you have any already) straight out to vtf/vmt. Haven’t talked to Turfs about it, but at some point the ability to export UE materials to Quake WAD would be good to help smooth out the Trenchbroom workflow.

Tutes sooooon.

[NEED_A_JACKET]

****. This sounds amazing.

Couple questions:

• Is the complex as simple collision fast enough to deal with the displacement geometry? That seems like it’d end up with a lot of polygons

• Does the texture tiling or scaling translate from Hammer to UE4? IE, no more making every single material tile manually in the material editor???

• Does anyone know if Hammer has subtractive BSP mapping these days?

[JoeWintergreen]

-Yeah, it works fine - but do note that you can set up collision however you want per mesh - the only reason it doesn’t do auto-convex collision on import right now is it’s tiiiiime consuuuuming.
-Yep, all the UVs are imported just as they are in Hammer, your result in UE should be the same as you see in Hammer
-It doesn’t. Personally I never liked subtractive, but that is an ooooooold argument

[motorsep]

So, how hard would it be to add Doom 3 .map support ? (at least brushes and lights only, no bezier patches since I assume UE4 doesn’t support those)

[NEED_A_JACKET]

@JoeWintergreen;443382

-Yeah, it works fine - but do note that you can set up collision however you want per mesh - the only reason it doesn’t do auto-convex collision on import right now is it’s tiiiiime consuuuuming.
-Yep, all the UVs are imported just as they are in Hammer, your result in UE should be the same as you see in Hammer
-It doesn’t. Personally I never liked subtractive, but that is an ooooooold argument

Thanks for the response!

Any particular version of Hammer recommended? I presume I can use standalone (without steam) versions?

[anonymous_user_7374055d]

The new cross platform Jackhammer editor was released yesterday with support for Q1, Q2, Q3, GldSrc. Jackhammer 1.1.855: Merry Christmas! news - J.A.C.K.: My Favorite Level Editor - Mod DB

It’s also on Steam Greenlight if anyone wants to throw some support their way. Steam Community :: Error

[taz0]

You can still find downloads for Hammer 3.4 and 3.5 but they only map for Halflife1 to map for HL2 you need to use the Hammer that comes with the game or you can download thru steam the source SDK’s 2013 sp and mp versions

[turfster]

@motorsep;443397

So, how hard would it be to add Doom 3 .map support ? (at least brushes and lights only, no bezier patches since I assume UE4 doesn’t support those)

Downloading doom 3 now (couldn’t yesterday because of the whole steam meltdown thing), I’ll let you know.
Bezier patches will be in, since just like for Source and idTech 1 & 2, everything gets converted to meshes anyway.

@uunx;443550

Thanks for the response!

Any particular version of Hammer recommended? I presume I can use standalone (without steam) versions?

I’ve mainly been using the one bundled with Left 4 Dead 2 for testing.

The first of Joe’s tutorials, about importing textures and maps:

HammUEr Tutorial 1 - Importing maps/textures from Source

The invisible floor is probably (can’t see his world outliner in the tutorial) there, but for some reason, UE has a tendency not to show everything in the map recently, especially in the same session after importing a lot of textures. Anyway, as explained in the docs, there’s an easy fix for this, where you just go to the world outliner, hide everything, and then unhide it again, and everything will show up.

[motorsep]

@;443621

Downloading doom 3 now (couldn’t yesterday because of the whole steam meltdown thing), I’ll let you know.
Bezier patches will be in, since just like for Source and idTech 1 & 2, everything gets converted to meshes anyway.

Here is Doom 3 .map format specs: MAP (file format) - modwiki

Patches (not whole a lot): Patch - modwiki

Collisions: CM (file format) - modwiki

Pre-processed geometry (if you find it useful): PROC (file format) - modwiki

[arbopa]

@JoeWintergreen;443369

Yep! For now I recommend Hammer, the version you’d use to make Half-Life 2 maps, because HammUEr exports your UE materials (if you have any already) straight out to vtf/vmt. Haven’t talked to Turfs about it, but at some point the ability to export UE materials to Quake WAD would be good to help smooth out the Trenchbroom workflow.

Tutes sooooon.

Which version of Hammer is that? I have 4.1 (build 6945), but think I got that off steam to build Insurgency maps (but never did)… Would be interested in tutorial on bringing in maps with textures… guess I should learn Hammer a bit… am used to Radiant (which is so easy to build maps in and move around)… so far Hammer seems a good bit different, and actually worse than radiant.

[turfster]

@arbopa;443642

Would be interested in tutorial on bringing in maps with textures…

Scroll up slightly

@JoeWintergreen;443369

Haven’t talked to Turfs about it, but at some point the ability to export UE materials to Quake WAD would be good to help smooth out the Trenchbroom workflow.

The problem here is that Quake 1 & 2 textures are limited to 256x256 max as far as I know, and 256 colours with no alpha.
That makes taking stuff from UE and putting it in a WAD challenging, especially if you’re working with larger textures that are 24bit (or 32 if with alpha).
While I technically could do this without too much trouble, it would only be useful for people working with lower resolution low colour count textures, if that makes sense. Anything larger/more colourful would end up blurry/posterized in the Quake editor and not really WYSIWYG.

[JoeWintergreen]

As long as Insurgency is on Source (I’m 99% sure it is, right?) you should be fine with that version of Hammer. I use the one HL2 comes with. As I mention in the vid tute, do not try to use the Source SDK launcher, because it doesn’t really work anymore - launches Hammer, but usually with various things broken.

[JoeWintergreen]

Also: HammUEr doesn’t currently import .RMF (HL1 format) but you can easily just open them in Source Hammer and save them as .VMF, which HammUEr will import.

[arbopa]

@;443649

Scroll up slightly

Yeah, saw that after I posted the question. lol.

Fiddled with gcfscape and was not finding textures to bring in… then searched a bit and found the vpk file (if you are using a source game that uses those), pick the one that ends with *_ref.vpk … that points to all the other ones, and is what you need to open to extract all the textures.

[JoeWintergreen]

What game was that for? HL2 still uses gcfs containing materials.

[arbopa]

@JoeWintergreen;443669

What game was that for? HL2 still uses gcfs containing materials.

Insurgecny is a source game, it uses vpk’s.

[JoeWintergreen]

Ah, interesting.

[SonKim]

Any chance you could add support for DOTA 2 Hammer 2014 editor? It uses a new .vmap file. Eitherway this is such a awesome plugin!

edit: I have a sample .vmap file here: Cahoots — Ann Arbor tech coworking