hey there,
we´ve been starting to use Unreal Engine for our linear content creation pipeline.
We do mostly TV productions and while I am overall having a blast, coming from 3ds max and Vray, one thing is constantly causing issues…
There is no elegant way right now to bring in particle simulations from 3ds max into Unreal.
So, this is going to be half rant/half asking for advice…and if some unreal devs check in here…maybe some inspiration for the roadmap?
- I´ve most successfully used Datasmith. The files are pretty lightweight, its only exporting ONE instance per shape I use, which is great, because then I can use nanite on these and import really hipoly particle meshes. I can also easily switch out the mesh in Unreal/change materials etc.
For particles up to 2000 its fine. But anything heavier and I run into a lot of issues. I already tried splitting sims into chunks of maximum 2000 particles and then put them all into subsequences. But after a certain amount of particles I seem to be hitting a hard limit and Unreal just keeps crashing.
Plus: Its not trivial to iterate, because if I reimport the datasmith file, it reimports everything, so every placed instanced geo is getting deleted, thus making the sequences loose their reference and rereferencing takes ages.
So its faster to just delete everything and then reimport, but of course you then loose all changes in the level too…
And of course it doesn´t support animated shapes at all. - Using alembic is also not feasible for large sims.
For small sims, especially with animated shapes, it works fine.
But for larger sims its not working.
I can export with preserving instances now from 3ds max, which also leads to a LOT smaller filesizes, but Unreal does not seem to respect the instances on import.
The files get way bigger and with a lot of particles, ram just goes through the roof and makes Unreal crash. - Currently trying to figure out wether I could utilize fbx instead.
I can also export FBX with animation and preserve instances, but I don´t know wether Unreal supports importing non-skeletal animations (P/R/S only) OR instanced meshes via FBX. - The only way right now seems to export as PRT and go through houdini and niagara, but there are multiple drawbacks as well:
We´d need a houdini license JUST for being the middle man to import.
It also seems rather complicated to replicate stuff like which instanced mesh to use for which particle, adjusting size rotation and all that stuff etc.
And neither FBX nor Houdini prt export would support animated shapes either…
I don´t think there IS a better solution out there right now and the best way forward for me would probably be to just learn niagara.
I´m so used to tyFlow though, that I am really hesitant to dive in, plus I don´t even know if I could do all the things I can there directly inside Unreal and training material is sorta sparse on that subject…