MEP Visualization

Has anyone ever used UE4 for MEP (Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing systems)? If so any tips/tricks and workflows that i should know of?
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Whoa… that piping line is… insane! :smiley:

I think UE4 could be use for MEP too. For the example scene above, I reckon you need to optimize the mesh heavily (pipes are using 8 side-polygons instead of 24 for example), and/or using proper LOD (level of details) meshes, otherwise your project might not be running smoothly (75fps or more).

The only thing I would suggest is every time you model a pipe uv/lightmap it right away so that you are always ready for import into UE4.

I would be using UE4 for marketing purposes (overhead) and not during the design process. I would be exporting from Revit to 3ds max. Can you assemble everything in 3ds max and then export it without having to set dress everything in UE4. I just want to be able to do real-time walkthrough and creates some custom view filters (ie. show only plumbing systems).

You’ll need to lightmap “everything” in 3ds MAX prior to importing into UE4, materials need to be created in UE4 as well. There’s tutorials on work flow from 3ds on YouTube and plenty of info here.

Actually its quite interesting to know about a good workflow for import complete complex scenes from 3ds max. I tried the TS Tools which can work but you have a lot of extra work to reproduce all the Instances in the scene.
Are there any other export tools out there, which can handle mass object export and respecting instances ?

Cheers
Dominic

I’m also a revit>ue4 user, and I found out a few things that may be of interest of you, would be great if you share anything you come up with as well.

-If you use dynamic lighting, no need for light mapping (resource intensive)
-Revit geometry is very messy. So if you do end up needing to do uv texture maps it can be tricky (I am still trying to wrap my head around uv’s)
Importing from revit:

  • You can export your whole scene from revit to 3ds via fbx (or parts of it).
  • When importing to ue4, as long as you dont have ‘combine meshes’ checked all of the individual meshes will be imported. If you select all of the objects and drag them into the ue4 viewport at the same time, they will retain their proper location in relation to each other. The downside to this is, they all share the same pivot point. This means that if you want to move an object in ue4 you are stuck with the move/rotate/scale handle being located far away from the object.

You can use temporary pivot point helper. Right click on an object > Pivot > then choose one of the options