Unreal Engine Datasmith Workflow: Model Preparation Workshop

hey everyone i recently had the opportunity to run another introductory workshop about the best practices for getting your assets into unreal engine for ltu or lawrence technical university this workshop was completely free for all participants and was funded by epic mega grants through ltu and was run fully remotely through discord this is a four part series that captures the entire workshop the workshop covers the best practices for asset preparation using maya and 3ds max and also the datasmith workflow for unreal engine module one is a two-part video series that covers the best practices of preparing your 3d models and data for unreal engine module 2 covers the 3ds max to data smith workflow and module three covers the cad to data smith workflow if you found this helpful let me know in the comments below and i'll be happy to share more unreal engine content on my youtube channel in the future so with that enjoy i'm going to be starting the next module so module 2 is going to be about looking at a data smith okay so module 2 will be specifically looking at data smith importing dave smith files into ue and just you know how to set up datasmith as a tool so the good thing is right everything that we've gone through so far still applies to data smith you want to make sure that you implement all of these best practices for um during the data smith uh workflow okay so everything that we covered you know regarding naming conventions materials models optimization textures everything okay the the benefit of data smith is that it just it helps the import export process okay so while we do that here's here's a couple things i'd like you guys to do in the background okay open up the epics game launcher here go to the marketplace uh type in search product automotive automotive materials and you'll get this automotive materials uh go ahead and just download that it's completely free and this is a fantastic this is one of the this is the best material pack not only for automotive but just anything uh industrial uh product design what have you it's it's paints it's metals it's plastics rubbers leathers cloths everything grab that all right and what's going to happen is it's going to show up here it's going to show up down here in your vault and you're going to add that and then you're going to add that to your project now here's the only disclaimer okay remember how the last workshop people ran into like an hour maybe i think i think an hour or so compiling shaders this is a material and shader heavy asset meaning if you bring that in you're gonna have to recompile all your shaders okay so it's just something that you can run in the background um but it may be something you want to wait and do download it so you have it and then add it to the project after now the other thing that you can do is simply go to add import here we're going to add a content pack all right what i want to do is add feature or content pack and i'm going to want to add content packs just add the starter content okay the starter content is already installed on your machine it's installed in on your c drive and all that so go ahead and simply add to project for starter content and what that's going to do you know unreal engine is really fast about just bringing you know other unreal engine assets into your into your project so you can close that it's done there it's slowly done already took it a second uh close that and then look you have all of these you know you have these maps materials uh that you can start to use and you can even apply to your object so if you want to play around with different materials the starter content is fantastic not only that but like it has these uh shapes and it has these props so you can bring in you know these different types of props and uh whatnot and if you go under architecture it has like these these these walls and pillars and stuff so you can kind of build your own environment uh on on the fly all right so i just want to get those two things kind of running here in the background um and while we do that let's go ahead now and i'm gonna go to the maps folder we have here and i'm going to go to room start okay so it's going to be a clean room so let's take a look now finally at data smith so there's a couple things that we have to do with data smith all right number one is that you have to install so if you go ahead and click this link here this link is going to take you to the data smith export plugins because remember the way data smith works is that it takes all any and all different file types and allows you to import them into unreal engine okay you can see there's autodesk 3ds max sketchup revit neverworks rhino gravisoft and form z those are just specific to the tools now if you're using something like a cad modeling software we're going to take a look at that workflow too but this one's going to be looking at specifically the 3ds max workflow okay so i already have this installed as you can imagine you want to make sure you download it for the right unreal engine version so you want to download the exporter and it goes through and run the exporter if you have 3ds max on your machine i recommend doing that make sure you have 3ds max closed and once you do that and you run the exporter everything will be uh good to go like basically if i click on this here you know it'll basically run you through the wizard and i already have uh everything like i said already set up and it it works all the way back up until 3ds max 2016 and then even up to 3ds max 2021. i'm using 3ds max 2020 um i'm just going to cancel this because i already have it installed and i don't want it to mess with anything and uh cool done and how do we know that it's been uh added in here uh like if i create just a simple box object and i go to export or basically export a blank scene you want to go down here to save as type and there it is unreal data smith it's a dot u data smith file perfect okay now how do we get you know where's our scene where's our scene in 3ds max the good thing is if you're going i already have this saved out as a scene here so i have this room interior max or if you're going from maya just export this as a maya scene as in fbx using the uh using the autodesk media entertainment so meaning i can select this export selection give it a second fbx import and then use the autodesk media entertainment and just export export the whole scene the whole group whatever and then when you're here you can simply re-import this fbx so if i go to import fpx now the only the only thing here you guys is that it this is just the workflow just to get this into 3ds max this is all this is so let it think and remember it's using autodesk media entertainment boom i'm going to go ahead and do that and this is a fairly light scene so it imports pretty quick and there you go and look at that everything's already you know all the materials and textures all the grouping um if i go ahead and look at my scene explorer here look at that all of our groups all of our groups and scenes and everything just like in maya is done it has carried over the 3ds max okay so the spx importer exporter is very good in in that aspect okay so just to make sure if i go ahead and open i already had the scenes for this already set up and you can just open that and you can see that the file unit scale um if it's set to millimeters that's fine as long as it's kind of the same uh working so you want to actually uh i would say rescale the file's objects to the system unit scale the system unit scales one unit equals one centimeter so what it will do is it'll go ahead and convert that over right and we can hit okay and then just to be sure you know like i said if we're using this this is going to be 183 height centimeters boom there we go so everything's everything's kind of working the way that it should this is a six foot tall cube we go inside um i always got to get my shortcuts between maya and max there you go right so this is the importance again of scale so everything's good to go this is pretty much the exact same scale this is the exact same scale as i had my miles centimeters 3ds max's centimeters and now what we can do is i'll go ahead and just delete that now we can just export this out so remember previously what we did right previously what we did was we went ahead and exported everything individually we exported them all as separate fbx's and we you know we had uh regular exports this here all these different exports okay what datasmith does is it automates all of that for you okay it takes care of all of the settings it all you know it supports instancing which is nice so let's say i have those three lamps in my scene i can instance it and move it and that instancing will carry over so instancing means you have it loads one model or one mesh in memory and the instance is all it has to track is the transforms so it's saving on it's just an optimization thing that you can do it takes care of materials and textures it converts all the necessary normal maps and everything uh all your textures it sets the proper units in scale it sets the pivots this is a big one right because remember it wasn't necessarily a problem it's just how unreal engine works well data smith makes sure that all the pivot points and scene hierarchies are the same here's another one auto generates these light maps uvs and then converts maps so if we zoom in here on my slide we can take a look we got to make sure though first we load the right data smith plugins because a data smith tool it's supposed to be right up here in our near settings so in order to do that let's go to window and we want to go to or not window sorry project settings and in project settings oh not project settings sorry editor there we go editor oh i probably had them mixed up to be honest yeah i i need uh importer oh i it's neither of those guys i don't know why i blank sorry it's supposed to be plugin oopsies so we want to go to edit plugins edit plugins sorry i don't know i went to these two so we want to go to plugins because i want to find importer or you could literally just go here and type in data smith right and you'll have all that stuff or it's down here under importers all right so we want to make sure we have now if you're using uh c4d it looks like cad just be careful it's cinema 4d if you're using cinema 4d boom use this okay we want to enable the cad importer hit yes because we're going to it's going to prompt a restart so we'll have to restart after this but go ahead and turn on multiple plugins here data smith fbx importer yeah and then data smith content okay so most of these like the david smith content um these are version 1.0 but they're still considered beta so they're still you know unreal engines still working through them but they work you know i've been using this since like way early and had stability issues but they seem to have addressed most of those and it gets more stable with every version um and it'll probably be good if you're doing like revit stuff to use data smith gltf importer so you might as well just turn that on and then you want to make sure to do data smith importer of course yeah okay uh if you're unsure i mean honest uh maybe i wouldn't say turn all of them on but you should be fine if you turn all of them on all right so once you do that once you select all of these i call these out specifically here the data smith content the fbx importer and the data smith importer here okay go ahead and restart unreal engine so go ahead and hit restart now and we'll zoom out here and let's go ahead and take a look at exporting our our model from 3ds max into unreal engine so what i'm going to do now everything seems to be good how do we know that insta loaded properly close this boom data smith import unreal data switch so we now have this icon i want to make sure that i go to this room start here okay so i have this room start remember this is uh all the lighting and everything's set up here and the volumes and reflections and everything so if you want to drop it in this one you can or hit control n right it doesn't really matter you can hit ctrl n and just do a clean default scene i can delete this here then i want to go to workshop i want to go to data smith folder this is where we're going to um uh save this okay so like we said our let's go ahead and export x for all of this so i'm just going to click off make sure i have nothing selected i'm going to go to file export export okay what this is going to do is going to do the entire scene all right and i want to go to now i'm not going to export this straight into uh what's it called into unreal engine i want to save it up here first now if you don't have 3ds max or if you don't have data smith as you're following along on this workshop don't worry i have it already exported here okay so i can grab this here this link and this is where i'm going to want to save this and i can do this and i can do this as a unreal data smith file and i'm going to do i'm not going to save over this but i'm going to do room interior underscore demo right because we're doing this live in this workshop so i can hit that i want to do all visible objects current render frame only all this is fine hit okay that's literally it that's it you know data split doesn't really let you do anything now it's going to come up with some warnings i already went through these it's just talking about a couple of um odd uvs here here or thing uh and whatnot but nothing that's uh is really going to cause any visible issues inside of unreal engine okay so let's take a look at what this did though so here is that room interior demo look at this file let me move this over here 383 kilobytes just for that one datasmith file well if you look here it created what's called an assets folder if you guys work if you've done work in cad or done stuff with maya or 3ds max or blender file referencing what it does is create kind of a master file and then references all of the objects that are in here and it goes ahead and creates all of these ud meshes and exports all the textures all of that is sitting in here so if i do a quick you know check this properties yeah a couple hundred mags that's about right right so what i can do now is you know copy this link and i want to go to data smith so you go ahead and import data smith file and then i want to go to wherever that link was and for this live workshop we'll do room interior demo hit open now it's going to ask us some questions after of course i tell it hey i want you to save into this data smith folder here hit okay now it's going to ask us hey geomet do you want to bring a geometry yes materials and textures yes lights i don't have light setup this is where if i set up my v-ray lights and materials it would automatically import them and set them up inside of unreal engine but i don't have lights cameras or animation so i don't need these and then expand the settings here and look at this right out the gate right out the gate you can tell this hey i want to give these you know you know what i don't want to start at 64. i want to start at 128. i know i i have a high-end machine i want high-quality high-res light maps you can raise the them here you can even go up to a max of 1024 if you want now this is based off texel density so what this means is it will see the size of your object so in this case if i go to inside my scene here inside of 3ds max it's it's going to make sure that this has an appropriate light map it's not going to give 1 10 24 it's not going to get 10 24 to this okay what it will give 10 24 is this because this is taking up a lot of textual density okay not pixel density textual density same thing here it'll probably be somewhere in the middle here for these so so yeah so that'll be good so automatically generate light map uvs max hit import now let's see what's going to happen boom done all ready it's going to come it's going to do a little bit of compiling shaders so those of you that are you know uh bringing this in the first time it'll be a a quick import but take a look at that boom now i know we just went through a manual process of doing this with fbx so don't kill me because now you see that data smith literally did it like that like instantaneously what's nice about this too look at this look at your outliner the world outliner room interior demo main interior room balcony all of this all of this this structure has carried over one for one look at this look at these pivots right it's set and adjusted all of these pivots now i can actually move these things based off the pivots of the original objects inside of 3ds max and maya or coming from maya like that alone i was like oh my god that's so nice that's so nice so you no longer have it resets it to the origin point here and you i mean you have the you know groups so it sets these groups look at these all my lamps in this one nice group okay i can grab this table right and then now i can go to that materials folder that i had previously right because you can see what it does here it tries to create these materials it creates these as master materials um or sorry it creates them as material instances that are based off of this master material look look how it does a pretty good job this is all data smith automatically doing this otherwise i would have to have manually created these uh myself like it does a pretty darn good job noticing hey you got spec maps so you got normal maps we're going to link those all in in in the proper part or the proper notes all right i mean this is pretty solid here but we already have materials like in this case the coffee table i can go to my materials here under arc viz remember and just grab that coffee table here coffee table i spelled coffee right there we go boom okay so what happens though right you saw me re-import fbx meshes right if we changed it and wanted to re-export it simple process right well what about here what if i i want to change some stuff here let's use this for example this face i want to make this really noticeable i'm going to really change this up let me just a big obnoxious statue that's going to sit here and then i also want to hey delete this lamp i don't want this lamp anymore in this corner by the window so what i can do is i can zoom back out and i can go to file export again just re-export the scene okay so if i go to room interior demo i made a couple of changes i made some adjustments i moved things around i scaled it i'm doing all this in max i can save this out don't worry about our warnings here i go back into unreal engine i can go down to data smith where it imported so i've got a room interior demo look at this right excuse me so we have this so this is our data smith actor here are all of our textures okay and in here are all of our materials and you can see it created master nodes so and here are all of the geometries right here all of our books and and and everything right our railings our shelves all of it's here organized and they have the right names too all right i think if you go to this piece here the statue 48 let's see will it let me re-import this so what you need to do is not do it there because it's not going to change anything you need to go back to the data smith file room interior import right click and re-import and it's going to prompt a new import now you have a couple of other settings too now you have hey do you want me to sync the data smith scene actors specifies whether or not to update the data smith actors in the current level i want to say yes what that means is any changes i did outside i wanted to update inside of unreal engine respawn deleted actors what that means is if i delete models in unreal engine like let's say if i deleted the lamp in unreal engine but not in 3ds max i can say no no leave it deleted and unreal i don't want to re-import it without having to go back across so it's just going to keep things organized and it's going to do something that's actually not shown here but watch if i go ahead and re-import boom and it goes ahead oops let's zoom in here look at that look at that big statue right look at the lamp the lamp's gone it's deleted and it did it through a simple re-import oh yeah look at this i reassigned this material it doesn't overwrite them with the previous materials that means anything that you've done previously where i reassign new materials to this i want to like reassign it to this couch here so i'm glad you know we i was able to show that so i can do mi couch you know i can throw these on this couch you can also just drag and drop on the straight up model itself like this okay all of that will say okay hey unreal well no hey we got it we see that you're using project specific materials we're going to reassign those for you cool thank you so do uh what is this this is a new scene this is a new level so if i save out this level here i do a file save all this will be my data smith map smith map and then it's going through and saving all the assets for data smith so let it do its thing let it kind of think here for a second awesome so that's done and then you know what i go back here to 3ds max i'm like you know what actually this is too obnoxious i don't i don't want to delete that i want to keep that there blah blah blah and do you know just remember not export selected regular export find your unreal data smith save over this it's going to update the assembly update all the models maintain all of the connections it's like a live link almost a live link right and obviously it's not a complete live link because i have to tell it when to re-import but if i go to uh data smith here and find this file i can again re-import and just reimport with the previous settings and we will see that if we go back into here there you go all right now you could let me see if i double click and open this this is mi you could actually update this on the on this part here and you can actually assign materials on the uh on the static mesh menu if you want because what i can do now is if i go to my maps and i go to the the room start and save all of this stuff sure bringing in a lot of stuff here and what i can do is now bring in the data smith asset the scene drag and drop it boom look at that i can drop this to whatever scene okay and i want to uh reset transforms all of my volumes everything that was here previously is is right right and right there and aligned then what i want to do right notice on my couch and here here's the thing that i wanted to show you this notice that i changed materials here in the outliner but not in the mesh so my couch i changed in the mesh so it has the right material but my coffee table doesn't oops all right so if you want to change it on on the mesh you can just kind of go here double click the mesh and then you can apply the right materials through this method um what is this coffee table coffee table instance i can grab that and apply that here and then save that and there you go see how it updates there so just keep in mind the differences between doing things in the outliner versus doing things in the content browser okay now the one thing that i want to do is things are pretty dark here uh i want to show you the power of although all those auto generated light maps if we simply go to world settings i'm going to turn this down go to your world say if you don't have world settings you can open that up right here settings world settings and then you can go to uh indirect bounces three just do three for right now um and everything else is and then what i can do maximum size that's fine yeah and then what i can do is do a build lighting quality preview and go ahead and build this and it's going to do a quick build now keep in mind all of the meshes are set to static okay by default so all my meshes are set to static all my lighting is good to go if you um take a look at the last workshop we spent the whole workshop on lighting lighting reflections baking light masks post processing if you combine that with this you guys will be set you have some really nice looking levels here it's going to build up pretty quick i have kind of a beast machine but that's why you use preview preview is going to be uh real quick regardless of your hardware you can see that it doesn't spend a lot of time so this is the storm engine in your taskbar crack that open uh and you'll see uh that there okay so finish building the lighting boom there we go so now we're starting to get some nicer looking lighting coming coming through in our scene okay now you may need to adjust exposure because we turn down the light bouncing right here i turn down when you crank this up back to 10 indirect number like indirect light bounces um that's going to bring some light back in there but actually if you let the auto exposure settle uh it'll it'll do what it needs to all right i'm going to grab keep things organized i'm going to collapse this go to our post-processing volume and look at exposure and you can maybe bump up the exposure compensation just a bit if if it's not too bright something like this so you can see that i can probably keep it around too honestly all right that's data smith really really powerful an incredible way to just bring in all of your assets and not have to spend a lot of time rebuilding and the update process really nice okay so we did all this we did the data smith automates the process with scene structure pivots materials and textures we loaded the starter content as well so you can try out different materials and textures we covered how to reimport changes and then now you guys try so for this workshop what i'd like you to do is instead of doing uh the fbx right you're going to import using data smith so what you're going to need to do is remember to load those plugins right so if you go to edit plugins you want to just load in the importer importer and load in all the necessary data smith importers and uh if you have 3ds max or or revit on your end do the file export and then export as a udata smith if you don't no big deal just import the file that i already gave you which is this room interior data smith and you have all these assets already with you do that i would say try to get to this point where you re-import it into this clean level into this uh level that i i called room start import into that one set up your materials set up your lighting man you're gonna have basically you know once you reassign materials and everything a a level that is you know ready to go and create some nice renders out of so wood floor get that nice floor material in there boom you know we want the wall paint interior where's the wallpaper interior matte instance in that instance interior mat instance by the way you might notice um this here boom boom there we go i think last thing was just this wall here there we go uh you might notice these guys these these are what's called blockers if i hide these um basically without these and the back face calling these are made to prevent light leaking so light leaking is where basically the light kind of makes its way literally through these crevices here um so by having these uh these here you know it all depends on the the size scale and everything uh it prevents any leaking from from happening okay all right cool yeah so we're right at we're right at uh a little bit over time not over time but right at time um so now is uh some workshop time so go ahead like i said open up a clean level uh apply materials you know oh yeah set up lods and collisions try to get as far as you can right go in here um there is there is a a workflow that is used to combine data smith and what's called visual data prep but i felt like that started getting over complicating things a bit for what we're trying to do today so i'm going to just stick with data smith and i can maybe cover how to go deeper with automating things like creating lods and collisions and stuff because you'll see if i click on the couch you'll still need to create lods here so you know no big deal on that you just need to remember change it to large prop hit yes and for collision right we want to just add a simple box sphere and hit save and then if you zoom in and out you'll notice the try count updating and you can see the lod changing zero one two three so basically do that for the other hand from the model so you feel uh comfortable with that obviously once you do that it breaks the the light bake um so i'll save and rebake so i still want to give about uh 30 minutes to uh for you guys to do workshop uh go through this let me know if you have any questions uh i'll rebake the lighting here too but hopefully you guys find this helpful i mean this uh this data smith plug-in really really saves a ton of time and help helps our helps out the process okay the next thing we're going to do in the next module is we're going to take a look at how to import raw cad data and we're going to use a couple of sites from there so uh in the meantime like i said go ahead and spend the next 30 minutes kind of building this scene on your end ask me any questions post anything in the chats and we'll just keep moving along all right that concludes the recording for this specific module be sure to check out the rest of the modules uh in the description and if you found this helpful please let me know down below and definitely plan to put out more unreal engine in unity and real time 3d content here in the near future so thanks and take care everyone

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 5,631

Keywords: unreal, engine, ue, workshop, overview, best, practice, scale, UI, content, unit, optimization, pivot, UV, lightmap, collisions, datasmith, workflow, 3ds max, plugins, how to, data, smith

Id: ydmHwI0cwLc

Length: 38min 15sec (2295 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/OnMars3d]

The entire workshop is focused on the best practices for exporting/importing models into Unreal Engine as well the Datasmith workflow (using 3DS Max and importing raw CAD data).

It is broken up into 4 modules:

Module 1: Getting Your Assets into Unreal Engine (Pt 1: https://youtu.be/27Y7gvH0qP0 and Pt 2: https://youtu.be/MQintq9BNmw)

Module 2: Datasmith Workflow (https://youtu.be/ydmHwI0cwLc)

Module 3: CAD to Datasmith Workflow (https://youtu.be/eLUP51WI9xw)

Bonus: High Resolution Screen Shots and Building Exes (https://youtu.be/4dZFesDYsbE)