Hi there,
I am an Animation student, somewhat experienced in modelling in maya and I have heard you can use Unreal Engine as the render tool, maya takes ages to render short animations…
So my question is what is the best way to prepare/transfer models from maya to Unreal. I am mostly concerned about applying/creating textures.
Let’s say I have an arched, double doors, (medieval styled) prop, in maya some details of said doors are separate objects. Usually in maya I would just pick and object (detail) and just apply texture to it, for example metal/wood and then combine the meshes so I can open the detail and the doors together, but after bringing it to Unreal, all the textures are gone and combined 2 objects are treated as 1, which is fine, but it means I have to create completly different texture, that already includes metal and wood detail.
Is it really the only way to make it work ? Creating dedicated texture, instead of just applying a let’s say a stock texture, which would be fine for the project I am working on.
pew, not a simple answer to that, may I ask what you’re experience level is with “PBR” and UV’s?
For such stuff the Substance(adobe)Painter workflow is super nice,…
And do I get you right? Your textures are all gone when importing to unreal, meaning you have a blank object?.. this is actually how this stuff works 
I’m also a Maya user, and thing is, when u “shade” in Maya, and expect that you get that stuff 1to1 into UE,… sry,… forget it, these are two different worlds when it comes to “shading”,… (UE is waaaayyyy nicer 
)
My approach is, use Maya only as the initial DCC to create your model/s, with proper uv layouts and unwrapping… then texture it outside in, jeah, let’s say Painter (PBR metall/rough workflow, directX normal format)
Treat your model and texturing “universal”,… so your’re not bound to only one software (at least this is my mantra)… meaning, With the PBR workflow you’ll easily achieve the same look in other engines, or Renderers
… and, jeah Preparing the model,… you could have overlapping UVs, but with different shaders (lamberts blinns and phongs and what not) assigned to, lets say your metal and wood… in UE imported, you’ll get these “assignments” acessible on your static mesh, to apply a nice and fresh material inside of ue…(and actually, there is a option during import to “not combine” the meshes, if your model is actually made out of several shells)
You could have your wood and metal in one combined model,… with no overlapping uvs, using the PBR workflow, where you can achieve, metal and wood look with only one shader and one texture set (basecolor,roughness,metallic,normal)
You could have the same thing with multiple UV tiles, having the ability to give your metal details a way bigger texeldensity (for some reasons) than on the wood, or vice versa…
Many many possibilities, I find the PBR multiple uv tiles workflow the most convenient (but in this case u need to use “virtual textures” inside of UE (there are many tutorials on this matter, easy stuff)
And I recommend to watch some Substance Painter tuts on YT… especially for “beginners” this might clarify a lot of whats going on (sry, don’t want to say you’re a beginner, just assuming it 
)
Hope this helps at least a liiiitttle
Cheers P.