Automatically create and/or apply materials from Maya to alembic meshes on import to Unreal Engine

hello this is a tutorial um on materials with a linux in unreal engine so we'll go through how to set up proper face assignments in maya so you can export the materials from maya and have them create and assign inside of unreal engine when you import the olympic or um we're going to go through uh how to create the face assignment in maya so that when you import the alembic into unreal engine it will automatically find an existing material in unreal and go ahead and automatically assign it to the limit cache so first things first here i just have in maya here's manny here i just have a few material assignments here with them so just selecting see so one thing that i wanted to bring up is um in the docs here if you were to go and look for the olympic file importer you go down here it says that you want to enable uh uv right and face sets so it says you will need to be able you will need to enable right faces if you plan on creating materials during uh import process in unreal engine 104 i should be probably 5.0 and i'll say the same thing it still says on around you 4. that's funny anyways um so if we just grab this guy and we go to olympic and then export selection and then uh let's look at the folder here so uh uv right and face that's is enabled so we're just gonna there and then if we bring this guy into unreal here uh what you want to do is there's find materials and create materials we'll go over find materials later but what what you want to do is you you want to click create materials now this is not going to work and i'll go back and i'll explain why it's not going to work so if you hit import you'll just see that just manny imported into unreal and it you know everything's just assigned to the world grid material so the key here on why this didn't work is because of this these face sets right here when you assign materials on the object level like the dag level or object level in maya it will not create a face set what you need to do to create a face assignment is to assign materials uh on the face level or the um on the polygon level or the component level um now you know those of you who have been around as long as i have this used to be a big no-no but for olympics and unreal engine um this is just how you have to do it so if we were to go so what i'm going to show you here is a big gotcha that people run into but i'll just let us run into it organically so you know if you wanted to fix this you just go okay here legs here and then okay here's my arms all right arms head head okay whatever you get the idea okay so now everything like those three or four materials are assigned on the face level so now if we were to go here we would to cache select many okay so and let's make sure we've got uv right and base sets export so now let's go back into unreal here let's delete this guy and then we're going to bring danny face level in here just upgrade materials click import okay didn't work why so the the gotcha here is if you have a material assigned on the object level and then you were to just go here select the faces and assign the same material again on the poly level maya is not going to create a face set i don't know why but mai does not create a base set when the same material is applied on the object level uh as in the face level so if you like let's just let's just create just a dummy material here grab this move it grab everything come on and assign it now we go here select the head and uh where's our head assign the head great so now let's take you so what i did is i on the object level i assigned just a dummy material and then i grabbed the polygon faces of the head and assigned it to the head material export selection uh manny let's go back in ue here oh there we go delete and then head crate materials now you see the head is in here and if you go you look on the asset the head is created all right the head is the head material is assigned to the proper material slot uh in unreal engine so that's the big gotcha like this took me longer than i cared to admit to actually figure out what was happening um so yeah and then another thing to note is that the material inside of unreal engine that it will create it it's created uh uh named off of the shading group so it cares about the shading group name not the actual um shader name or material name like this is what names the face that's coming out of maya not this um so so that's one thing so that's creating materials inside of ue and then having them automatically assign so if if we went like a you know i don't think we got to waste time and do all these guys with just what's going on so his hands and then uh his feet just to show you that it works okay so now if we were to grab this guy i'm back at that mini proper a proper current materials and it created them all and it assigned them all uh you'll also notice that um engine is not going to bring over like your whole shading network all those nodes aren't supported um 5.1 will start getting into like material x and things like that you know it will start to be able to play around and mess with that sort of functionality but for right now that sort of stuff um is not supported so it's you know it's just a head start on getting you to uh be able to create your materials now let's say that there are already materials inside of unreal engine like let's say you've got you know just kind of canned um uber materials that are in here or it's the same version of a new character or the same character it's just a new version or updated one and you wanted to automatically assign to materials that are already in unreal engine um so that is easy enough uh so basically let's just take like m glass and and mirror so i touched on it cares about the shading group name so m mirror and then m class and then uh i think it was one of them was like in plastic plastic so now let's blow the rest these guys away and then great so same process just export out um any system back in android engine so let's go here let's bring in many any existing now here the thing you want to change is to put it to find materials uh i wish unreal engine was smart enough where you could just have those both of those enabled and basically the import logic is smart enough to go in your project and try and find materials and if it finds material go ahead and automatically assign that to the material slot and ones that it can't find goes uh you know go ahead and create those materials uh at this point in 503 um the logic that's fun enough to do that it'll just try and find materials and it can't find the materials it'll just stop and it won't create them so at this point it's just one or the other um we've i've put in a bug report um to hopefully be able to get that fixed but as of right now i think so just a note to do one or the other anyway so just do click on find materials now import and you'll see manny comes in and he's assigned to m glass and mirror and plastic and to note you don't have to have the materials in the same folder that you're importing in your asset it could be you know anywhere in your project so it'll it'll just look for the particular names in your project and go ahead and automatically uh assign them to your object um and that's that's it that's you know hopefully that makes working with uh linux a little easier in the engine um it could be you know a little weird a little confusing especially with the fade sets and then on top that especially with that little gotcha uh there in maya um but if you have any more questions or yeah you know things are still confusing or not working for you feel free to drop a comment drop me a line uh yeah have a great one

Channel: Shaun Comly

Views: 2,703

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Id: pvOhK6_ld-o

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022