Rhino Direct Link - UE 5.0

[Czaja]

Hi, it’s very good to have Rhino Direct Link working in Editor now.
However, after the first tests, there are some things that worry me.

1. Hidden objects

If an object is hidden (talking about objects, no layers) it is still being sent to Unreal. Because Direct Link is helpful in the design stage for constant feedback, you must know that during design there might be a lot of hidden geometries that shouldn’t be sent to Unreal. If they are sent anyway it defeats the purpose completely. Rhino’s hidden geometries also can’t be moved to other layers just to be hidden in UE.

Either more control on what is being sent is needed, or It needs to match exactly what is visible in Rhino. Fighting with two viewports (Rhino and UE), constantly changing two lists of visible/hidden geometries at the same time is way too much trouble for anyone who needs to focus on design.

Simply hiding Rhino layers as hidden actors in UE5 outliner prevents us from using Play mode because outliner hide doesn’t affect the game. It would be extremely beneficial if we could quickly enter Playmode for the 3-rd person exploration of the design.

2. Player Collision (complex)

It would be good if directly linked geometry could have Player collision automatically set for the reason mentioned above.

3. Rhino Worksession

Similar to hidden objects, there must be some control over Rhino’s Worksession. Right now everything is being sent to Unreal. Turning off the layer might not be enough.
For example: In Rhino there might be a site or topography attached as worksession and it needs to be visible during work. At the same time, it can’t be sent to Unreal because we already do native Unreal topography (Landscape).

I also noticed that Blocks from the attached worksession files are not sent to Unreal.

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For Direct Link to work, there should be far more control on what is being sent, in what form, and settings. Is it possible that there would be some sort of Dataprep for Direct Link?

A lot of things can be specified in Rhino as Attribute User Text and it could be interpreted by Unreal during import.

Direct Link for the editor is very promising but with limited control, it can be also very hard or impossible to utilize.

Thank you for your work!

[Antoine_Guillo]

Hi Czaja91 !

So this is awkward but… after investigating we actually found that we do not support hiding individual objects, only layers… That particular use case was not reported to us initially, and shoud be a very easy fix.

We’re targeting 5.0 preview 2 to add support for hidden objects.

Regarding collisions, you can change the collision type in the imported meshes, or do bulk edits if needed. I would suggest changing the collision type to complex as simple for complex shapes, and leaving it to simple collisions for simple shapes and straight walls.

You can find more informations on collisions on this documentation page Collision | Unreal Engine 4.27 Documentation

Dataprep like workflows for direct link is on our todo list and we will be looking at adding at least simple functionnality to prepare your scenes.

Hope this helps !
Cheers,
Antoine Guillo

[Czaja]

@Antoine_Guillo

Regarding collisions, you can change the collision type in the imported meshes, or do bulk edits if needed. I would suggest changing the collision type to complex as simple for complex shapes, and leaving it to simple collisions for simple shapes and straight walls.

Hi, yes that’s what I normally do with my Dataprep workflow.
However, when using Direct Link often I can’t rely on manual tweaks, sometimes Rhino workflow is based on re-generating new geometries and deleting old ones (e.g. by Grasshopper), because of that, many (if not all) geometries have different GUIDs and everything I manually setup in Unreal I need to do again.

@Antoine_Guillo

Dataprep like workflows for direct link is on our todo list and we will be looking at adding at least simple functionnality to prepare your scenes.

Impatiently waiting for this! Good luck with it.

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Other wishes for the Rhino Datasmith Workflow

1. Import option to merge Block geometries into Actors
It’s important for that to be an option, not a must because it has its flaws which I described here:

Datasmith/Dataprep Compact Actors - Access to materials

Hello, there is one good UX decision you made when importing Revit through Datasmith. You put Railing pieces inside one Actor. This prevents outliner from being flooded with thousands of pieces. [image] 1. Dataprep module Can we please have the Dataprep module doing exactly the same for objects we filter? Sometimes I import railings created in Rhino, and I want to have a compact outliner. I don’t want to merge meshes, of course, I just want to put a list of geometries inside one Actor. 2…

Because I constantly need to jump between meshes and objects like: post-process volume, SunSky actor, ExponentialHeightFog, etc. it’s extremely annoying to have outliner flooded with thousands of small objects.
On the first screenshot, you can see Revit Railing which has all the meshes put inside one Actor. This helps big time in preventing outliner from being flooded.

I think it should be an option on the Datasmith import if some elements should be imported separately (into outliner) or aggregated inside Actor.

Revit Datasmith Railing Actor

Rhino - VisualARQ Railing - which basically is a Block

[romio82]

Hi @Antoine_Guillo,

@Antoine_Guillo

Dataprep like workflows for direct link is on our todo list and we will be looking at adding at least simple functionnality to prepare your scenes.

editing capabilities for objects and materials imported from Rhino via direct link is something I’m also extremely interested in! Do you maybe have a hint for us on when we could hope for some first options in that direction? Is it something we could expect for 5.1 or is it further away?
Where would I have to go to stay informed on progress in this matter?

Thank you!

[Antoine_Guillo]

We do not have an ETA on this, and it is very likely to be a feature for after 5.1

We usually update our documentation with each release to reflect the new features. This would also be mentioned in the release notes.

Cheers,
Antoine G.

[romio82]

Great, thank you for the fast reply!
Eagerly looking forward to post-5.1 then

[Czaja]

Since we have 5.1 already and some time has passed I wonder if there are any news about it. Can we expect Direct Link Dataprep to show in UE 5.2?

[Silver3D]

Hi,
5.4 is out, is Direct Link Dataprep still on the roadmap? I’m working with Direct Link in 3ds max and it will be very useful to have Dataprep to do many annoing tasks…

[UE_FlavienP]

Hello, this still has low priority, and should not be expected for the upcoming year.
We are reworking the whole import framework and we first need to migrate Visual Dataprep and Direct Link on that framework.