UV Mapping Large Scale Models for UE4

Development Architectural and Design Visualization
1

Hi guys,

I don’t have a ton of experience in Unreal Engine, but for the past four months or so I have been creating scenes and such with this application, mainly of outdoor or natural subjects. I have also created some pretty neat looking small scale archviz scenes, with components made in 3ds Max and uv mapped to have the two channel setup that Unreal Engine requires. The guidance of the Lightmass thread on this forum started by Raghu with very helpful input by DanielW and Koola and others has made my scenes look quite a lot better. The issue that I have run into however, is in the scale of the imported meshes. The small scenes made and uv mapped in 3ds Max look good, but importing a full project from Revit is causing me problems. Sure I can do it, but the walls and components aren’t uv mapped. Considering that the project I’m importing is a three building complex with a very specific and intricate layout of walls, and roofs, it really needs to be uv mapped to get a realistic and optimal look.

My question lies in the workflow from Revit to UE4. Is it possible to take a completed Revit project and uv map it in 3ds Max or something like that, and then import to unreal and get optimal results? Has anyone done it? Taking every wall apart and uv mapping seems like it would be an incredibly tedious task, so can anyone recommend a good mapping plugin for Max? Sorry if my questions have already been answered, I kind of just discovered this forum.

Thanks

2

It can be done, but if you have many many objects it starts to run very slow.
What I do is UV Wrap each object individually in 3ds max with a script “AutomaticFlattern_v11.ms” on both channels then export as FBX
Importing in UE4 you have to import them as individual objects (so not combined), make sure you drag them all out into the window so it finds their coordinates, and then group them together.

I can never get it to look good if I UV Wrap multiple objects together in 3ds max and import them as a combined object.

3

You also can use max script called steamroll, I use it whenever working with many objects. Steamroll will create flatten uv map on user defined channel for each object automatically. Saves ton of time.

4

There’s no easy way to go from Revit to Unreal Engine unfortunately. It would be more worth your time learning 3ds well so you can quickly and easily fix the model or redo parts of the model when you need to.