I am senior 3d artist trying out UE for the first time. My tools of choice are 3ds max / vray. I feel good about the process of getting my 3ds max assets into UE. I am finding it easier to just export the assets as fbx and then creating my materials in UE then trying to get my materials from max into UE.
Where I am looking for advice and knowledge is after that process. I am bit confused on the overall workflow of the lighting. I really want to try the whole VXGI process. geregistreerd via Argeweb but I can not find the VXGI area inside of UE. Does anyone know where and how I can load that into UE?
My other question is if that is not possible what is the best way to achieve the most realistic lighting results. I have been reading about opening the lightmass.ini and changing setting in that. Again no idea where I would find that.
I also wanted to know if there is way of saving materials to a library to re-use. For example, if I make a nice hardwood floor, or carpet, glass, metal etc how can save those out and reuse them on a different project as not to recreate them for every project.
This is a really great community of knowledge so thanks for everyones help.
Lightmass is baked lighting (like using Render to Texture in 3ds Max) I would avoid editing the config files and just use the Lightmass settings in the UE4 editor. You can adjust some of the global Lightmass settings in the World Properties. To use Lightmass baked lighting you’ll have to have your models prepared with a second UV channel which would be assigned to the lightmaps, the UV’s for this have to fit in the 0-1.0 UV space and can’t overlap: Unwrapping UVs for Lightmaps | Unreal Engine Documentation
It’s kind of annoying to have to do which is why people are interested in using VXGI which is a real-time lighting effect that has GI though it’s not as high quality as baked lighting it’s very fast and you don’t have to set up lightmap UV’s.
As for a material library, you can create and save your materials in a project but if you want to use them again in a different project you will have to use the Migrate feature to basically copy the materials to the other project.
You can also copy/paste the ‘‘content’’ folder of your project to another project via windows file explorer. It’s even faster I think.
If you are serious about archviz and come from vray, forget vxgi! Try to learn how to make a good baked scene instead. vxgi quality isn’t impressive for architecture.
Thanks for the info. I think I am going to spend my efforts at this point and avoid the VXGI until I have a better understanding on the lightmass and the overall process and flow inside of UE. I think I just need to become more comfortable using the program then I can make a better call.
Yes I found that migrate option so that will be very helpful. I will send some shots of my first project when I have something to show.