Vray and 3dsmax, baking into Unity3d for VR

[cheerioboy]

http://www.quitenice.co/blog/2014/9/...nity3d-updated

Hi, I wanted to share my latest workflow blog post for getting a Vray rendered 3dsmax scene baked into Unity3d. I've been exploring this for months trying to refine a process that allows for taking scene for standard still renderings, and allows for quick VR conversion. At the moment I can get a scene into VR in about a day, which can work well for quick previz. Render power & render settings will off course affect this. Further time is needed to refine any issues that pop up during play through, and also time for further material refinement within Unity3d.

My Rift demo uses this process more or less, which can be found here - http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...4-4thFlrStudio

I haven't worked with scenes that make heavy use of displacement or scattered objects, but for interiors it's been working pretty well. I can't wait to see more architecture projects that utilize VR and actually look decent.

Maybe at some point we'll get VrayRT for Unity3d?
Or just VrayRT VR?! With a bake option!

[Vizioen]

http://www.quitenice.co/blog/2014/9/...nity3d-updated

Hi, I wanted to share my latest workflow blog post for getting a Vray rendered 3dsmax scene baked into Unity3d. I've been exploring this for months trying to refine a process that allows for taking scene for standard still renderings, and allows for quick VR conversion. At the moment I can get a scene into VR in about a day, which can work well for quick previz. Render power & render settings will off course affect this. Further time is needed to refine any issues that pop up during play through, and also time for further material refinement within Unity3d.

My Rift demo uses this process more or less, which can be found here - http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...4-4thFlrStudio

I haven't worked with scenes that make heavy use of displacement or scattered objects, but for interiors it's been working pretty well. I can't wait to see more architecture projects that utilize VR and actually look decent.

Maybe at some point we'll get VrayRT for Unity3d?
Or just VrayRT VR?! With a bake option!

Waw great, I was planning on looking into the whole game engine industry for archviz, this will make my quest a little easier I think. Thank you.

[cheerioboy]

They also announced this weekend that you'll be able to build VR demos with the free version of Unity3d soon - http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/09/20/...port-in-unity/
So that'll make things easier to dive in and test before fully committing to the software.

[AlexP]

Ive been messing with UE4, from your blog post it sounds like a pretty similar workflow.
One thing Im wondering about, as I ran into this myself, but if you collapse multiple objects into one object and then baking it into 1 x 2048 texture - arent you finding you get some very low res areas in the baked texture?

[cheerioboy]

Ive been messing with UE4, from your blog post it sounds like a pretty similar workflow.
One thing Im wondering about, as I ran into this myself, but if you collapse multiple objects into one object and then baking it into 1 x 2048 texture - arent you finding you get some very low res areas in the baked texture?

Yeah that's a good point. I guess I haven't seen any huge issues yet. Maybe the projects I'm working with are relatively small. When I see issues then I'd break the mesh down into more chunks, floor_concrete_01, floor_concrete_02, etc.
I could probably skip the combining step now that I have a faster way of switching the materials to unlit/texture. It used to be a task that I did manually. So having 500 objects would have drove me crazy.

[Syclone1]

Id be interested in knowing exactly what settings you are using to export from max to unity, Ive been using unity for a while making a drilling simulator for my comoany and got frustrated early on with trying to get the textures to come in with the meshes and gave up and just started creating new materials inside unity.

[cheerioboy]

Id be interested in knowing exactly what settings you are using to export from max to unity, Ive been using unity for a while making a drilling simulator for my comoany and got frustrated early on with trying to get the textures to come in with the meshes and gave up and just started creating new materials inside unity.

Are these materials with baked textures? I do have to do some work, remaking reflective shaders in Unity. But I've gotten a workflow where at least the basic material imports with the baked texture. From there I'll start converting specific materials to reflective, and play with their reflective properties to try and match my work inside 3dsmax/vray

[Syclone1]

The reflections I can deal with, its trying to get the baked materials to map properly to the meshes that I had a problem with, both with FBX and MAX files.

[cheerioboy]

The reflections I can deal with, its trying to get the baked materials to map properly to the meshes that I had a problem with, both with FBX and MAX files.

Do you use the settings within the Render to Texture dialogue? Save Source, Create New Baked (choose Standard:Blinn). After baking all your objects will have a shell material with the original mater & baked. You can then 'Keep Baked Materials' & clear the Shell. When you export, tick 'Embed Media' and they should come into Unity.

I've also done all the baking through backburner, and then run the Render to Texture a second time locally with 'skip existing', and dialed in settings to create the new materials. Hitting Update Baked Materials for good measure

I should probably make a video tutorial on this, after all the time I've spent with it.... ugh
Still have trouble baking reflection maps. The only that has worked is using Dabarti's baking tool (http://dabarti.com/vfx/vraymtl-maps-baking-script/). But that requires so many render passes to get all the aspects of the material.

[Syclone1]

Cool beans, thanks for the info. I might try to make a test scene and play with it again. Cant wait for Unity 5 lol

[coolhand78]

bookmarking this thread!

[cheerioboy]

Revived from 2014. ha! I still use this process as it works really well to bring a 3dsmax/vray space into Unity and into VR pronto. I could typically process a scene I'm working on within a day and have it render over night for previewing in VR the following day. I haven't touched reflections though. It's nuts that Unity still doesn't have anything decent in place for reflections.. maybe they do now? I'll be digging into all the latest updates when the Rift is released.

[cheerioboy]

had to share this nugget:

Original issue - RenderToTexture will only render .tga when rendering more than one object, you couldn't change the filetype. Typically when I'm baking I'll have 50-100 objects so I'm forced to render out .tga
As usual I learn something new that I didn't know for 10 years... I found this today, http://forums.cgarchitect.com/34620-...jects-jpg.html

If you go into the UI/macroscript folder, you can edit the Macro_BakeTexture.mcr and change the default filetype it'll use. Default is .tga, which I've now changed to .exr

So far it's working, 32-bit float images are being dumped out. Can't wait to play with them!

[Robert Everhardt]

Unity gets SSRR "screen space reflection., yet still not implemented

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYBEndFphik

[bardo]

actually, if I'm not in trouble, it's implemented and you can find it as Cinematic effects on the Unity Asset store official page.

It should works both 5.3 and beta 5.4