Hololens + Vray

[sheehan_partners_nm]

A quick word about content creation:

The good news is that there's a few apps that can immediately view any fbx file.

The bad news is that more robust experiences can only be built with Unity. Other game engines do not yet have a native exporter. This leads to a whole rant on my part about real time VR / AR and game engines; namely that, as many of us know, the workflow from Max to Unreal or Unity is absolutely wretched. So wretched, in fact, that hardly any serious tutorials exist on the subject. It's why I've switched - for now - to Stingray. Does Stingray produce the same quality as Unity or Unreal? No. Is it about 100% faster to get assets from Max up and running? Absolutely. Will Stingray someday look as good as Unity and Unreal? I have no doubt. Anyway, mini rant over.... heh.

Stingray is supported from Hololens? Nice... In the other side, if I need to see just static models, I dont need a game engine right? My understanding is either use a sketchup 3d file (and pay 1500$ for their app to view models) or use other apps that support FBX format. We work with Revit/3dsMax a lot so Autodesk file extensions are to be exported more often.

[Neilg]

the workflow from Max to Unreal or Unity is absolutely wretched.

what trouble are you having? we've exported entire scenes as fbx and they come into unity fine & well organised ready for the materials to be rebuilt from freshly baked textures.

[landrvr1]

Stingray is supported from Hololens? Nice...

No, no. Just to be clear...Hololens doesn't support Stingray; at least not yet. A native exporter might be coming to Stingray, but not anytime soon.

There's a free app (can't remember the name) that views FBX files in Hololens with zero work involved. No game engine required!

It's beyond me why the SketchUp people don't yet have built in Rift or Vive support. Crazy. Instead, you have a choice of a half dozen 'pay to play' services. Heck, Sketchup doesn't even yet have the capability to export a stereoscopic cube map for fixed point VR...

[AlexP]

what trouble are you having? we've exported entire scenes as fbx and they come into unity fine & well organised ready for the materials to be rebuilt from freshly baked textures.

UV mapping for lightmaps

Also no plane lights.

Also how do you get around the memory limit for textures?

I was prepping a small floor of an office building, got as far as sofas in reception and ran out of texture memory. All the maps need to be high res so it actually looks good imo.

Are you doing any extra work in max before sending to FBX?

[Neilg]

UV mapping for lightmaps

Also no plane lights.

Also how do you get around the memory limit for textures?

I was prepping a small floor of an office building, got as far as sofas in reception and ran out of texture memory. All the maps need to be high res so it actually looks good imo.

Are you doing any extra work in max before sending to FBX?

Fair enough on the first 2 - we baked the lighting.
memory limit - http://amplify.pt/unity/amplify-texture-2/
used unwrella to unwrap and vray to bake. super simple process and very quick. problem we found is that despite being quick, it still adds enough time that most of our clients dont think it's worth the money.

[AlexP]

I tried to bake the lighting as well (my preferred choice by far) but stopped because of the same issue.
Do you think Unity is better than UE4 for this sort of thing? May need to give it a go if we can get round this texture bs
Had been using Flatiron, but as you say, the extra time is not appreciated.

[Neilg]

I found unity much more straightforward to use than UE4.
we'd pretty much given up on UE4 for being too slow to get going (ie too high a price for clients to pay) but I had another crack as i heard on the grapevine that unity, baked lighting and amplify was how these scenes were built & run in realtime - http://www.nurulize.com/nureality/
the texture detail is insane on the full res shots.

While I went with traditional baking to get running, I suspect they didnt use a traditional baking method - one of the partners is scott metzger who developed a technique using mari to project 32bit hdri's back onto geometry. ( http://media.fxguide.com/fxguidetv/fxguidetv-ep165.mp4 )
I never spent enough time with it but it seems like rendering a bunch of 360 32bit images and exporting the cameras to mari would make the reprojection/baking damn near automatic. Not sure how they approached unwrapping, probably did it beforehand. I'm making a lot of assumptions about this because of the team involved that got it together and what they're all known for. Although given vlado & peter are also partners, maybe there's a process we dont have access to involved.
Still need to go back and try and nail that workflow, it seems like it has potential to be able to convert a finished max/vray scene in little more than a single day if it works how I suspect.

[AlexP]

Very interesting..
Never considered such an approach but makes a lot of sense since we are not making game assets, but static environments.

[landrvr1]

For me, there's a whole bunch of issues at play here. The reason that Stingray is now the platform I've adopted is simple: tight integration with Max.

Object and materials are both a 'live connection' between the two programs, so fiddling with endless FBX export/import revisions is totally unnecessary with Stingray.

V-Ray materials are supported (though only basic at this time; stuff like override or 2 sided of course don't work). This support of V-Ray mats is massively important, because at least I have a solid foundation to build upon in Stingray. I have to 'dumb down' my materials in Max, but that ends up being a very fast process; especially if you've standardized on material names and can easily swap the full blown mats for stills and films with 'Stingray' ready versions.

Our projects are complicated office interiors that always start life in Max/V-Ray.

I have no idea the politics or dealmaking involved between Unity/Unreal/Chaos/AutoDesk, but it's very clear to me that Unity could absolutely care less about the architecture business. AutoDesk has already created a ton of excellent workflow tutorials around Revit/Max/Stingray integration, but how many have Unity produced? Zero.

At the end of the day, given our horrific project schedule demands, I'm going to gravitate towards whatever company and platform wants to make my life easier.