Revit to UE4 Workflow, UV unwrap + Lightmaps

I’m trying to learn a Revit to UE4 workflow that’s relatively painless enough that the visualization people in my architecture office would use it. We want to be able to create VR simulations of our building designs quickly, with the amazing UE4 lighting and materials but perhaps without the level of polish and love that you’d put into a game experience; not because we don’t want to but because when the design can change wholesale we can’t spend time on things like UV unwrapping.

Also, our Revit building models have hundreds or thousands of meshes—every wall, mullion, piece of glass—so we need to figure out how to streamline and automate whatever we can during the import process. And that’s where I’ve hit a roadblock, with UVs and lightmaps. I’m pretty much new to unwrapping UVs; with our renderings we only have to adjust UV alignment of materials in a perspective, and let Vray handle the lighting—no worries about wrapping, overlapping, or packing faces into a tiny square. After going through some very helpful tutorials (this, this, and this) I’m thinking, oh man. It’s just not feasible for us to manually do this for the number of meshes we have. I found this script but I can’t seem to get to work. And from those tutorials above it sounds important to do it manually, to choose where the seams are, to snap to a grid, make sure you have two pixels between faces, etc.

It would be great if someone could let me know whether it’s possible at all to streamline the UV setup. Thanks!

Scott

I am attempting to do the same thing. Have you had success, Scott?

If you’re using 3dsmax? have a look at Flatiron plugin, might make baking UV’s for lightmaps a bit simpler for you.

Thanks! I am reading up on it on their web site. Once I bake the UV map, can I still increase/decrease lighting in Unreal Engine? Thanks again!

I usually redo most (if not all) UVs generated in Revit. For some entities the default UVs might work, but anything with curves 99% make Revit churn out horrible UVs. Then there are the 2nd channel UVs which are best done by hand. So what has generally worked for me is, just export the unique elements (walls, floors, etc) and repeatable elements (doors, windows) export each separately and reinsert as instances in UE4. No magic bullet solution, but saves me from tweaking gazillions of doors and windows etc.

Thank you very much!