First of all i know there are ton of links on google on this topic but as usual, everyone has his own opinion and for beginner like me its hard to find middle ground that works.
I hope that there is some truly experienced UE artist that can shed some light on all the darkness.
Question is: I’m trying to build a whole appartment in 3ds max and transfer it to UE4 via datasmith and my main concern is how to i set up my static geometry
All walls are one geometry with proper topology for windows and doors. (unwrap with just flatten or corners need to be properely stitched)
Every wall is separate geometry with thickness (perpendicular wall ends are capped?/do i attatch and unwrap them all together or separately ?)
Can i make a ceiling/floor just a rectangular plane with shell or do i have to create ceiling for every room separately ?
4.With geometry in general does it have to be face on face or little bit inside or penetrate a bit the closest face (like with floor molding and a wall and the way liquids work in vray).
5.If i create floor with floor generator in max do i have to cap the bottom faces or can i just leave them open ( last time my floor just turned black after light bake in UE, and when i moved it a little bit on z axis it changed to normal color)
Will there be any issues if i chamfer and just “flatten” unwrap objects like walls/moldings/ doors?
If i import walls, ceiling and floor with datasmith, what would be my workflow if i want to import other objects later, like doors, lamps, random props. Do i export them from max as separate datasmith files or can i somehow import them also as fbx/obj? ( last time i tried obj/fbx i had weird articiafts with light bake.
Thank you in advance to whoever is willing to answer all those basic questions, but i feel what is extremly frustrating for me is nothing for a person with an experience. And sorry if my wording is not uderstandable, i will try to explain myself better if something is confusing.
For things like wall/ceiling/floor you need to split them up a bit, each separate object will only get a single lightmap so if you have a lot of surface area then it can’t get enough detail in the lighting. Typically, what I do is try and put the walls of a room as one mesh and the ceiling of that room as another. The floor can be a bit different where you need to try and split it up on natural boundaries.
Don’t cap the walls, since it’s not visible it won’t add anything to it. But do try and have the wall/ceiling/floor meet exactly in the corners and not extend past each other. For example, if you just took a large plane and made it the ceiling across the entire apartment then the shadows where the walls would be will bleed onto the visible areas due to the pixels of the lightmap not lining up exactly where the wall would be, which will mean that you get dark shadows in the corners.
Datasmith is designed to import the whole scene, so for things like props (chairs, etc.) then you can use instancing like you would in 3ds Max and in the Datasmith conversion it will have just one copy and then duplicate that mesh in the scene to maintain instancing.