Max to Unreal

[devin]

Is there a plugin or set of plugins that will do all the heavy lifting of texture baking and exporting from Max to Unreal? I'm looking to establish a workflow and I know that many of you have been experimenting with Max, Vray & Unreal for a while so I'm looking for any advice your willing to share.

[Nicinus]

I'm still on 2015 but in 2016 there is apparently a new Game Exporter with presets for bot Unity and Unreal. I'm getting my Vive soon and would like to establish workflow as well.

[cheerioboy]

a plugin. wouldn't that be nice

The issue is there doesn't seem to be one solution that works for all. Depending on the type of project, complexity, organization and cleanliness of the geometry, UV channel usage, it can all affect how things will go. I've got an ok workflow that gets me results that might not be good enough for marketing, but they're good enough for design decisions and client review. Even my workflow can be quite tedious as you have to have to say stop, lock down the materials & geometry and start organizing, optimizing, and prep for baking.

I'm on the fence about continuing to bake in max, or learn to use the game engines lighting. As soon as you start to want interaction within the scene you'd want to move away from out of engine baking. But I find the lighting/GI/baking engines in the game engines to be horrid and scary -- to put in some settings that could take hours to process with no idea how it'll turn out. At least with Vray I can distribute the work and watch or test maps as it goes along to make sure the fidelity is where I want it.

[vlado]

Didn't Unity or Unreal have "on-the-fly" baking, where you could see the maps getting progressively calculated while you navigate the scene?

Best regards,
Vlado

[cheerioboy]

It certainly calculates while you continue to work - but if you tweak a setting or move a light then it starts to recalculate again... so eventually I'd assume if you're comfortable fiddling with the gi settings, you could get it to take hours to finalize a bake. As far as I know. I've done more baking in Vray than I have within a game engine.

[Pixelcon]

Didn't Unity or Unreal have "on-the-fly" baking, where you could see the maps getting progressively calculated while you navigate the scene?

Best regards,
Vlado

Yes and it works fine. You can just bake a preview of the lighting at low res in under a minute while you're working away. Production level lighting can take upwards of an hour for a top-end level (from what I've heard on the unreal youtube channel). Been playing around with unreal for the last few weeks and it's a pretty tedious process...

[Sbrusse]

Yeah, baking GI can take way more than 1h depending on the size of the level and using swarm is a work around to use a farm but it's still not great.
That's why over a year ago I asked if it was possible for Vray to team up with Unreal and have Vray bake the lightmaps for Unreal, at least we would do the whole thing in Max/Vray and use Unreal only as a viewer.

[samuel_bubat]

Meanwhile I do the lighting directly in unreal. I made some experiments with Vray. The Vray GI is a bit better but the process to always bake, export and import is just a pain. The UE4 GI is quite robust you can tweak it to get very fine details. The recently added skylight portals increases the quality quite a lot. The baking process can take very long but you can setup swarm server for network rendering. I´m currently using Vray for caustics, only. In UE4, Lightmaps are pretty hard to access and they are, well not "human readable". It would be easier if a lightmap was directly accessible for each object and it was just an image that could be locked, changed and edited. But that´s not that case. I´d really like to see Vray as a texture baker for real time engines I red Octane can do this, but I never tried it my self.

[Sbrusse]

Do you mean that Octane can bake lightmaps for UE4?

[samuel_bubat]

OctaneRender 3 also supports a live and offline baking tool chain for game engines such as Unreal Engine 4 and Unity,

from
https://home.otoy.com/otoy-unveils-o...-gpu-renderer/

I have no idea if this means they really create native lightmaps or it´s just a simplified baking process. Also there is Brigade from Otoy, a realtime pathtracer.. well more a pathtracer for realtime engines. The Otoy examples are quite impressiveThe user examples on the other hand, who obviously don´t own a multigpu backend look not much different from what VrayRT can do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abqAanC2NZs.
This one for example.

[FSGFX]

never trust otoy...
the announce something and have to take it down a week later...
cause it wasnt true or they dont have the permission... happended several times the last years ...

[devin]

That's why over a year ago I asked if it was possible for Vray to team up with Unreal and have Vray bake the lightmaps for Unreal, at least we would do the whole thing in Max/Vray and use Unreal only as a viewer.

This would be ideal, any word on if this will ever happen?

[cheerioboy]

This would be ideal, any word on if this will ever happen?

What is it that you want exactly? To bring your geometry from 3dsmax into Unreal and bake with Vray? Or bake with Vray in 3dsmax and bring into Unreal..

I think I'd prefer an optimized workflow from 3dsmax/vray into Unity or Unreal. Since I'm still having to make still renderings in 3dsmax. Might as well make that work in 3dsmax be useful towards a VR experience. Instead of having to setup lights & materials in a game engine to use the vray baker.

[devin]

I'd like to have the optimized workflow from Max/Vray to Unreal, I want the VR to look just like the renderings without having to redo everything.

[Sbrusse]

You can't access to unreal lightmaps in any other way than baking the GI in unreal.
Baking to maps in max and importing in unreal is not possible.
So the only way would be for unreal to open their lightmaps capabilities to third parties so that anyone can bring in the lightmaps.
BUT, their lightmaps is not juste a simple maps as it seems, so vray should adjust the FI output to fit the data type that unreal would need, and that can only happen if CG tries to contact Epic to talk about a collaboration.