Datasmith Feature Requests

[Yupa-sensei]

Other thing, that can be seen as a feature request: After the beta, the subscription will be 45$ monthly or so. A perpetual license with upgrade if the guy want to would be great, because I hate subscribe for something that I can loose if I stop subscription.

[kenpimentel]

Off the top of my head, I would say:
- Generate UV lightmap for selected objects. I noticed some geometries do not import with UV map for some reason and it would be helpful if we can only select that geometry and generate a new UV lightmap, instead of re-importing the whole scene. This is very helpful for large projects.

- Be able to adjust the size of the 'baked' maps that DataSmith create when importing scenes from 3D Max.
There are some shaders of complex textures that can be translated to Unreal (this is understandable) but there is no way to adjust how big or small that texture gets baked.
This can be fixed later in anyways, but wonder when the project is very large if this feature could speed things up.

I hope our new re-import workflow in 4.20 will support this.

[kenpimentel]

Other thing, that can be seen as a feature request: After the beta, the subscription will be 45$ monthly or so. A perpetual license with upgrade if the guy want to would be great, because I hate subscribe for something that I can loose if I stop subscription.

This is how Unreal Studio subscription will work. If you stop paying, you keep using that version. You just won't get new versions. We probably shouldn't call it subscription.

[kenpimentel]

As a mechanical designer, I use Solidworks A LOT. It's pretty annoying that Studio supports the native format up to 2014 only, because last years the program improved a lot, and I can't use SW2014 anymore. Of course I can save models in STEP, but I loose all the benefits of lights or camera. And Studio can be a killer app against Vizualize Pro. (but maybe this explains that?) Anyway, if you can, please support Solidworks up to 2017 (at least) !

I am confused. I know for a fact we load the most recent Solidworks data (2017). Have you tried it? Or are you referring to some documentation somewhere?

[duke22]

A callback that maxscript can respond to would be great.
- DatasmithHandleMaterial
- DatasmithHandleMap
- DatasmithHandleLight
- DatasmithHandleGeometry, etc.
The parameter would be the node.
You could return false for DS to handle it, and true if its handled by your script. This allows us to handle materials and maps DS doesn't yet support.

[FrankiePibbs]

I'd like to see the possibility to import BIM Metadata in Unreal Engine (If present in 3DSMax for example or Revit)

[duke22]

I'd like to see the possibility to import BIM Metadata in Unreal Engine (If present in 3DSMax for example or Revit)

I think asset userdata is coming in 4.20, so you'll be able to intercept it and do things with it.

[kenpimentel]

Correct, the 3ds Max plug-in will export metadata in 4.20 and we have features in-engine to handle metadata.

[Yupa-sensei]

This is how Unreal Studio subscription will work. If you stop paying, you keep using that version. You just won't get new versions. We probably shouldn't call it subscription.

Pleased to read that. Thanks. How it will work if I stop the so called "subscription" for, say, a year and I subscribe again? Have to pay the whole price? Can I have a discount? I have to pay the year lost (for you)?

I am confused. I know for a fact we load the most recent Solidworks data (2017). Have you tried it? Or are you referring to some documentation somewhere?

No, I didn't try yet, for the moment I'm reading/watching documentation and tutorials.
The information about Solidwoks is in the link below. And "Up to 2014" was written last week for sure! ^^
So the supported version changed, cool. But I read elsewhere in the forum also that other guys had problems since they used SW2017, so I was thinking that SW2017 was not supported yet.

[kenpimentel]

re: subscription
We haven't fully locked down our policies, I don't expect you to pay a "penalty", but we could wind up rewarding those who don't drop and then come back.

re: SW
Yes, we fixed the documentation for Inventor and SW. The product supports all recent released versions. However, we are still working on SW2018. Just try it, it works. If it doesn't file a bug report and we'll fix it.

[Yupa-sensei]

Count on me. ^^

And for subscription, what does Substance is really good.

[jeroen_v]

Luoshuang's GPU Lightmass!!!

[davide445]

Ok returning to UE/US for a special kind of archviz project, comparing with Lumion and searching for the faster way to populate and render an area and existing BIM architecture with vegetation, persons, materials, etc I did say a huge collection of pre-made assets will be beneficial.
Lumion appear to be way inferior in term of rendering customization and dynamics, but it's really easy to use with the tons of pre-made assets one can just push inside his project.
Sure professionals as I see in this forum didn't need this, but for less tech capable users and use cases where the final goal it's to push out a result in the fastest way can be a real plus.
A Lumion license is costing about 30 months of Unreal Studio subscription but came with 1465 models, the Pro cost twice but come with 4395 models and more features, there is space to go from current Unreal Studio 100 materials.

[kenpimentel]

I completely agree with you. We're trying to do something about that too. Stay tuned.

[roberteker]

A robust and modern hierarchy system, with expand all, collapse all, hide/delete subtree, etc. etc.

The hierarchy support in Unreal right now is so rudumentary and volatile that we still prefer to use Unity. Unreal is also really picky about object and file naming, which Unity isn't, and you get a lot of long and complicated file/part names with CAD importing.

I reported both issues here, with surprisingly little response from the Unreal community:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/unre...ree-operations
https://forums.unrealengine.com/unre...e-object-names

The assembly/feature tree is the core of any parametric CAD software and its very surprising to see that this wasn't done better with Datasmith.

My suggestion is to not just dump a Datasmith import into the scene, but rather create a Blueprint from it first, and then let the user place it. That blueprint would then contain the hierarchy, which should support all "normal" hierarchy interactions (as mentioned above).