Maya to Unreal

[Music] hello in this tutorial I'm going to look at a quick overview of how to get assets from Maya into unreal this is not meant to be a replacement of some of the excellent tutorials professor Li is provided on the same Channel where he kind of compares the unreal to unity workflow if you're interested in that take a close look at it and this one we're going to be looking at the process as though we've already completed the unity process as well so I might be referencing how we did it in unity and how to compare it to what we're doing here this isn't comprehensive but we will look at the basics of the process so again this model is based call Wei model all of the textures here are tiled textures very very small very very lightweight so it should be pretty easy to move from asset to asset it also has generally pretty refugees including some overlapping UVs unity is really tolerant of these overlapping UVs unreal is a little less tolerant to that so we might see if you errors pop up as we go along the way that I'm going to do this is by manually using the export here there are some file export to unity and export to unreal here I'm not a big fan of these I just I'd like to make sure that I have a little bit more direct control over what happens so what I'm going to use is regular file export selection here when I export selection it's going to ask me what file format I want to use FBX export again is the way to do this now generally the settings here are fine making sure you have smooth mesh any reference assets which we probably aren't here I'm not worried about any animation so that's turned off no cameras no lights and no audio but on the embed media I'm making sure to include in bed media as in the export options this will make sure that all the textures are embedded into this single FBX file that can be unpacked by unreal so I will call this our hallway unreal demo and export the file if all goes well then we should just see down here on the result that we've indeed exported this FBX now while I'm here I'm gonna go ahead and export my attach light in the same way export selection this will be my attached light and the hanging light in the same way export selection so that I have all of these ready to go now when you launch unreal you'll have a dialog like this I'm going to go ahead and launch the Unreal Engine 4.19 if you have multiple versions of unreal installed you can do that this actually takes a little bit it's going to open up the editor where we can then start working with setting a project this is similar to unities project wizard that first opens up when it opens you can either open up old projects or work with a new project now there's a whole bunch of different ways that we can work with blank things like that we're going to go ahead and use a first-person kind of pre-built project this is going to have imported a bunch of the assets that we need it actually has way more assets than we actually need but we'll go ahead and bring them in down here on the bottom you can decide where you're going to save the file so for instance if I'm going to save mine here and I'm going to give it a name all the way on a real demo so this gives us our path and the name that we're going to do I'm going to go ahead and click on create project now this can take just a minute to set up what unreal is doing now is it's creating a new file structure new project structure just like we would have in Maya or unity and it's importing all of the basic assets it needs to allow you to do this first-person stuff now I'm gonna resize this a little bit so I can make sure that we can see it here when this comes in the default thing that it opens is this demo that includes a first-person shooter and if we press play we can indeed run around here it's even got a gun and it attaches projectiles we could build all this stuff in unity this is kind of typical of the difference between unreal and unities approach to this unreal tends to include lots and lots of stuff that can't that you have to kind of strip out depending on your need where unity you have to attach all the stuff to build up to where you're going to in both cases when you press play then it goes in and plays the game you hit escape to exit the play now this built set here is great but we're not going to use this we want to build a new level that we're going to bring our hallway into so I'm gonna come up to the file pulldown menu new level it will ask what I want to build here in our case since everything is inside the mountain I'm going to just create an empty level which means that I don't have any SkyDome or any of those kinds of things so by default I just kind of have an empty lot empty set now if you look in the interface here one of the things that I want you to stay away from for now is this import button where it seems like this should be the way to bring things in but it's gonna save a lot of time and effort if we just use the file import into level option because what this will do is it will import the FBX and make a new blueprint of everything that we need so it will then say well what do you want to import so we'll bring in the hallway unreal demo go ahead and click on open it's going to ask us where within our file content we want to import that stuff to we'll come in to the geometry I'm going to right click here and call this hallway assets go ahead and click on OK what this will then do is unreal we'll proceed to look at the at that hallway FBX it will check to see if it understand what's happening there's a whole bunch of options here that you can play with we're not going to have to met mess with most of these for the most case let's just go ahead and click on import to use the default settings now this can take a little while because in unreal is unpacking looking at the geometry looking at the textures creating the appropriate materials and shaders tying everything together and by default it sets up doing an on a second UV set for the light Maps whereas in unity you have to do that manually when it opens you can get a few message logs that that might show up most of the time you can ignore most of these and so I'm going to go ahead and delete these it also opens up this mesh editor that you can kind of see this is kind of a preview of what all of this looks like for where we're doing here again we can also just delete so that's done is it now inside Arsene our default scene here you're gonna see it's called untitled as we have this FBX hallway that we've got set up now there's several ways that that unreal works it's a little bit different than unity if you'll notice here then it sees Y as being in depth where unity is Z is in depth and going up vertically unity sees that as Y and real sees that as Z you can still use the Alt right middle and mouse click drags to work with it it's a little bit different though it's the reason why you'll see a lot of people in unreal just holding the right mouse key down and then using the W a s and D to actually maneuver it can be a much more intuitive way to think of it you this in unity as well though I tend to find that most people in unity are using are using the Maya methodology to move around okay so the other thing that this does is that it already has built in the first-person player and what it uses is this class called player start that you can come and drag into your scene again hit f2 to frame it where you can decide where you want the game to begin now the problem is is that if I start with this set here and I go ahead and press play it's a little hard to see what happens but everything goes black now as I hit escape you'll see that I'm in kind of a weird place that I've kind of been shot back into a strange place the reason is is by default unreal handles collisions a little bit different than you might be used to in unity what it does is all of its collisions for instance this geometry right here is seen as a solid object what it means is that if you start inside of it and we immediately jex you out so you're either on the outside the bottom side the left side this side side you can't actually be in it doesn't see it as the floor and there's the wall it sees this is one solid object so before we can do too much we want to do a little bit of adjustment to how unreal brought this in to do this come down into your content browser change your view options let me resize this a little bit so you can see it change your and may resize it some more change your view options so that you're looking at it in columns once you have that in columns then we can start to say look I only want to talk to the meshes so let's organize it by type and now I'm gonna select the top mesh scroll down hold the shift key down and select the bottom mesh when I have these I'm going to right click on any of them come down into the asset actions and oh let's see I could be able to see that let me pull that up a little bit so in any of these I'll right-click come into the asset actions and then come to oh you still can't see that it's capturing is gonna be a little tricky so asshat actions and then will come down and use bulk edit via property matrix so again right-click on any of the static meshes we have selected asset actions bulk edit edit via property matrix when you select that you'll have a new editor that shows up here again select from the top and let's go ahead and shift select down to the bottom that over here on the side will type in collisions and we'll start to see some other things that pop up now by default unreal brings in this level as static meshes meaning that it thinks that those things are not going to move this will be important for when we're baking things but if you start to look at this area collision complexity what we want to do is come in and change this to use complex collisions as simple if we collect to use complex collisions as simple and then we go ahead and close this down then now we will be built in a way so that when I press play in the game everything's black but I'm actually not shot out of the out of the level let's go ahead and stick a light in here so we can see how this works a little bit better now over here on the Left there's built in kind of prefabs that we can use you know you bring in a sphere if you need to or for us we're going to come in by default and just bring a point light into the space they bring this point light into the space then the properties of it will be set over here you can see that it's got things that you would anticipate an intensity setting so I can adjust the intensity it also has things like attenuation radius which is kind of like range and unity if you're familiar with that by default this light automatically cast shadows so very similar to the way that you would kind of think of how unreal and unity approach this a little bit differently unreal has almost everything turned on whereas unity has almost everything turned off what this means is that if I drop something in there it's automatically casting shadows different than how unity works so if we have this setup here if I were to press play then after this dramatic adjustment of how the lights work then we should be able to see how this space is inside of the game now it's got all this garden stuff which is fun but silly don't get distracted by that is we're trying to work through it you'll also notice that it gives us this option to set or this warning that light needs to be rebuilt basically it needs to be baked in the way so we've talked about but we'll talk about it in a second okay so using the strategies we've used before I'm going to go ahead and get rid of that point light there I don't need it for now I'm going to use file import into level and I'm going to import our attach light I'll go ahead and put it in our hallway assets scene the default settings will be fine not going to worry about those or this and then I'm going to import into the level also our hanging light also into the geometry hallway assets bring that in go ahead and import that alright so once all this stuff is is in I'll be able to see it too over here on the side so for instance here's my hanging light so if I select that and I frame that then I'll be able to see where that's at the don't worry about this actor icon that's right here for what we're going to want to do that that will be fine now what I'm going to do though is I want to make sure that I'm looking carefully at this particular asset I'm going to come in here and while it's here I'll will of course use some of the other options so I'm going to come into the lights use a spotlight bring that spotlight get it kind of into position and go ahead and kind of tuck it up into there if I start to look at this lit let's make sure that's actually sit down there a little bit then we can start to see how this would look in the scene now it's not baked or anything so we have to be kind of aware of of how that might be a little bit different and I'm probably going to find that I'm if I group these together that I want to be able to take all of this and slide it up just a little bit so that it's not quite so low in our space but now as I start to look at this being lit I can start to see how this might start to work now again with that spotlight and come in and do everything from changing an inner outer core intensity even the light color so maybe I want to give this a little bit of a yellow light to it that we see there you can see that all of the same things that you would expect to see and these lights are all available in this area um okay so one thing that's a little bit different about how this works if we want to start copying and pasting this into space is that when you start to even though this is a child if I take this this object right here and copy and paste it ctrl-c ctrl-v it doesn't take the children with it so you want to make sure that you take both of these the keyboard shortcut for duplicate in unity is actually control W but when you hit control W then you can see that it that we can get that other information there so let's look at this unlit for just a second and let's take both let's take all of this stuff here and let's actually pull it over into another chunk of our scene there will be a little bit easier to work with so I'm going to pull all this stuff over here similar to what we had set up actually in unity down this hallway just so you can compare apples okay so I'm gonna go ahead and get that set up I'm gonna against like both of these ctrl W let's side that over ctrl W ctrl W we'll slide that duplicate over ctrl W like that duplicate over we're gonna not gonna worry too much about getting this exactly right but we just want to get some of those into that space so that when we look at this lit we can start to see how that's outputting now it doesn't look like I'm in the middle of the hallway so I might take a second here to grab all this stuff and actually adjust it over so that it might be in a little bit better place for what I'm after okay so if we were to go ahead and play notice this hasn't been built yet but if I were to go ahead and play in the scene then I should be able to walk over here and start to look at how that how that space actually actually works now again escape to get out of there we want to make sure that I start to build this lighting setup because currently our lighting setup it doesn't have any bounce lights so it's really really dark in in this space so what I'm gonna do is with my lighting setup here and when I come up to the build options here and tell it to build lighting only what this will do is it'll start to bake all of our lighting down make sure that we can get a little bit more sophisticated output you can't see it but down on the bottom right corner of my screen you're gonna see this some dialog that's showing that it's actually building the lighting when it's done you'll start to see it building the rest of the of the lighting and baking those textures as needed to into the scene alright finally when it's complete you'll see this message log let's not worry about these these will be fine for what we're doing here but you'll see that the output is much more sophisticated you can see that we can actually see a lot of the bounce light and how that works I'm gonna come up and let's go ahead and grab our controller here our player start and I'm gonna move players start into this hallway so we can see this a little bit better so now when I press play after after we light up then we should be able to see how our output is working here so here's the basics what's happening now some of the things I still don't like is for instance even though the light source is coming from there that's not illuminated which doesn't look good to do that we need to make a few adjustments to how the texture works so let's look at how we would adjust that so in order to get that right what we need to do is come in and adjust the materials that are already built there and we've already built the materials in for this in Maya as we saw in the unity tutorial if I look if I select that FBX that actor here then as you look down on the side here we'll be able to start to select for instance in this case that hanging light so we'll see the static mesh that's created we'll also see the two materials that are attached to it one is the kind of green blue material here and the other is the material on the inside that is meant to to glow if you double-click on that it will open up the material editor that allows us to work with this now this is kind of this is super nice method of working very similar to the hypergraph our hypershade in maya we can do things like change you know basic colors of things if we need to if we choose to and we can also do things like I'm going to take this node copy and paste it so I've got another node and use its out and connect that to the emissive color so what it'll do now is that now not only is this material have a base color but it also has an emissive setting as as well the settings for almost any of these you can also see over here on the left side as you select them but it becomes a really easy way to kind of start to work with this so making sure that this material is emissive when you try and close it says hey do you want me to save it yes we want you to save it it will make those changes and then we will see them illuminated in the space this starts to make this much more believable again it's already got a default glow on it so that it's just like a post rendering stack in unity we can start to see and believe that lighting much more becomes much more believable

Channel: UIW 3D Animation and Game Design

Views: 25,623

Keywords: Maya, Unreal, Lighting, Baking

Id: ef0ORb-ibbc

Length: 21min 35sec (1295 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 25 2018