Unreal and Oculus Rift Architectural Adventures from a complete noobie

Hello Everybody!

I would like to first introduce myself as a complete newbie in unreal4 & Oculus Rift territory, I have had a total of 4 days experience to date.… I am however, a 3d Visualiser. So I do have an extensive knowledge of 3Dmax, Vray & Photoshop amongst a zillion other related programs.

I run a small 3D department at an architect studio in the UK, and have decided to look into new and upcoming technology, as such, I want to explorer real time walkthroughs (Unreal) and the possibility of VR (Oculus Rift). So we have invested into a Dev Kit 2 for the OR and have subscribed to Unlreal’s engine.

I have set myself three projects to produce in Unreal, using previous projects the company I work for has produced in the past / currently producing, ranging from a small scale Female Toilet, to an internal medium scaled retail scheme to a large external master plan. This way I can fully gauge how useful this tech will be for our company, and how realistic it will be to produce such projects in the future, bearing in mind I am new and have no fully adapted assets.

My first project is the small scale Toilet, I have produced a visual of this in the past and have a pretty much complete model of it. So I have gone through the basics in Unreal to understand the simplest of tasks to import my FBX files, apply basic materials & Lighting. I have also managed to work out how to use the OR on the level however I will leave this as a separate task once the model is fully built / lit and textured in Unreal.

This is the visual of the smaller of the three projects I will start with, my aim is to get it to this level in terms of lighting & materials whilst keeping Frame rate above 60 (If poss).

Please see my current progress, I do have several questions of problems I have encountered so far, just due to my lack of knowledge in this software so far…I am hoping that this thread can be helpful to others if they are just getting started plus when I am better acquainted with the software I can hopefully show case the results!

  1. I have created a texture, I have applied it to my wall model and all I want to do is shift the texture down on the Z axis so the repetition is hidden at the top and bottom of the mesh, this would be very simple in 3DMAX (I’d just move the UVW Modifier gizmo up or down)… (Please see screen shot of texture)…

  1. Another texture question, am I right in that with every mesh export I do from 3DMAX, I should Unwrap the mesh first and apply it to Mat ID 1 before exporting as a FBX? I’m still wrapping my head around the whole light map’s, it’s all still pretty alien to me.
  2. For my mirrors I have set the roughness to 0.1, how Can I make it more reflective as when I “play” the scene, they look pretty dark as I approach them
  3. When I “build” my scene I get a few errors, 1) Object has wrapping UV’s? and another is overlapping UV’s? – I’ve never really had to deal with UV’s in this way before, can someone please explain to me the best method to avoid these kind of errors?


5) Talking about Materials for a moment, is there a large Physical based Material Library available for download / purchase?
6) How is it best to light a small internal “box” like this toilet scene? I have several spot light sources and I know you can use IES maps, which is great! in Unreal though, how are they to use compared to maybe something better?

Thanks to everyone that has spent the time to check this thread out, any help would be very much appreciated.

Hi, there. I’ll try to help you with your mapping troubles…

You can keep your UVW mappings as they are in your project, so you don’t need to adjust it again inside UE4. Just add a Unwrap UVW modifier to your mesh inside 3DS, make sure they are not overlapping (use “Open UV Editor”, select all the faces and apply “Flatten by Face Angle”) and set the Map Channel to “2”. Keep the UVW Map at Map Channel “1”. When you export this to UE4, those mappings will be set to 0 (UVW) and 1 (Unwrap UVW).

It will look like this inside 3DS: cc3238cd3bff190d89a23907934ff3db3fa7ead5.jpeg

About the lighting setup… I think the way you are doing is ok. You can set all those lights with the same IES profile you’ve used in your VRay project. With all the lightmaps troubles solved, the UE4 lighting build should give you nice results. Just be sure to rise lightmaps resolution to a good value and set Lighting Quality to “Production”.

OR you can use UE4 and generate UVs for light mapping into a 2nd channel

It is amazing and we’ve been using it since we’ve discovered it!

Thanks Rabellogp for the response! although now I am having problems trying to get my mesh to view correctly in Unreal, I’m not very good with Unwrapping plus I don’t really understand it - Do I have to manually align all my meshs in unwrap mod in max before exporting across? I am getting errors on the mesh that looks like noise…

That’s fine. The faces are all separated like that because the “Flatten by Face Angle” script divides the mesh by angle. There is a default angle value that you can change, but it’s fine for simple meshes.

Now that map will be used by UE4 when you generate lightning. It will calculate the light (light vray does) and store the information into lightmaps that will respect that second mapping channel you’ve created. This channel doesn’t affect the way your materials are mapped on your meshes unless you change that manually. The materials are going to use the first mapping channel (the UVW one).

You can also keep only the UVW Map on your meshes in 3DS and generate that second channel inside UE4 like dreampunchboy said. Did you try to generate lighting after setting the maps correctly?

edit: Now with 4.5 update, you can let UE4 generate Lightmaps UV when you are importing the FBX files =)

657f2455807b75915f7795b568a751089c8048ec.jpeg