VAD Maya to Unreal Lookdev: Import FBX meshes with textures from Substance Painter & Maya into UE5

in this video I'm going to discuss how to bring textured assets into unreal bringing in automatically all of the the assigned textures to them I'll walk you through the process kind of in real time and then we'll Circle back and I'll go into some details that might be helpful so start off in substance painter go to the exports and we're going to choose from my list of output templates we're going to choose here the unreal one and then you just click out export and then jump into Maya in Maya we open up the bridge tool navigate to where our textures are so I have them in a subfolder here we need to give in the name of one of our shaders and I just check this for unreal instead of for Arnold launch it finds the texture maps that we've written out and then hit proceed it's assigned all of the texture maps that we need to bring it into unreal so we select this top of the group go file export selection these are just sort of standard fbx settings from Maya the only thing I've changed from just from the believe it's called media entertainment Autodesk preset is to turn on smoothing groups which otherwise unreal is going to complain about if you don't do so you just hit export selection and then we jump into unreal and here I've just got kind of like one of these starter template scenes and I come into my folder here that I've made and I just open up the Explorer window here where I've got the file and I just drag it into here it's going to give me here these options and I have it on combined meshes otherwise it's going to be a whole bunch of different mesh parts but besides that the main thing I need to do is come down into here and this is going to be set like this of create new materials and you need to change it to create new instance materials and then choose material and we're going to be using a master material that I'm going to be providing so what we want to do here is if I clear the properties here under base texture property we put in the base color map under normal we put in normal map and under base specular we're going to put in orm which stands for occlusion roughness and Metal that is a packed mask map where the red the green and the blue Channel both all correspond to the occlusion for the red the roughness for the green and the metalness for the blue then we select import all and it gives me some messages here where it's found a name clash and corrected it for me thank you and here we have all of these Shader instances that have been read in and you can see that the shaders are all the textures are also read in here and everything's assigned so if I just take this guy and drag him into the scene then there he is and we can open up this asset here and you can see that it's reading in all the maps quite nicely so it's just that easy so let me now with that kind of running through the the step-by-step let me now Circle back and we'll take a look at this in a little bit more detail if we come into the templates we've got here for example this one here this is a DF Arnold color spec bump metal as exr and it's doing the map of cxr the other one says jpegs and writing out a base color or diffuse map bump map metalness mappiness and a spec map this is a mask for the roughness and the difference with the on real output is that it is instead writing out a well it's writing on a diffuse mat clip before it's writing on a normal map because unreal wants normal Maps as opposed to bump or height Maps and it's writing out what's called an orm map which stands for again occlusion roughness and metallic and this is a packed map and that's done for efficiency because it's actually costly and unreal to read in texture maps and so you want to pack them all these uh masks into the triple RGB channel for a single texture map and that's more efficient and everything we want to write out is going to be in PNG for unreal that's going to give us a much better results in quality than say like a JPEG would the difference between what the standard Unreal Engine 4 maps are to mine is that these are writing out the roughness value and mine instead are here on the green Channel we can get it to display here it's writing out this user 0 meaning that it's giving me a mask and then I can use that math to pipe that into the Shader in unreal in this case so that's it for substance painter let's now jump in and take a look at some details with Maya here you can see that when I switch it to Unreal it's using Blinn shaders so normally you would use AI standard surface shaders for Arnold and and connect up maps for that in this particular case however for unreal unreal doesn't understand Arnold standard surface shaders nor does it understand Maya standard surface shaders so it only knows these older more Legacy like shaders like Blinn so that's what it's doing then it's giving you blin shaders so if I click on this guy here you can see that it's a blend Shader and it's connecting the base color into the color the normal map into the bump mapping and the roughness channel into the specular color so that's kind of the if you want to build that yourself um that's that's sort of how you'd have to wire that up this is basically just taking this thing which is uh kind of tedious and time consuming and just making it automatic that it's creating all these connect connected shaders which it then saves that into the fbx file and then reads it into unreal so so jumping into unreal let's take a look at the Shader that we're using here this is uh the DF default coat so this gives you a coat there's also one that I have that gives you subsurface scattering if you need that so you can kind of choose which one you want under the shading bottles here you can see that they have the default lit and then the subsurface and then the clear coat so they have them kind of separated out as opposed to something like Arnold where you'd have this one Shader to rule them all and if we look at the instance from it so the way that these work is that you have the master Shader which is here and then that is sort of where you can make all of the connections and sort of basically have to kind of build the Shader from scratch and then that gets implemented into a instance where you have here these familiar properties so we've got the the base color map the weight I added a little desaturation because of Mega scans did that it seemed like a good idea so I stuck that in there we've got this is an override so if you want to instead of having this Shader map that you have in here on this you want to just put in a color you just click on that and you can then enable that and then here you can just pick whatever color you want likewise we've got uh override metalness Maps so if you your medalist maps are reading in and making it you know black or white depending on whether it's metal or not and here you can override that and if you if you want to then we got the orm maps the occlusion roughness and metal and those are driving well the occlusion roughness and metal in this particular case the main one that we care about for the specular section is obviously the roughness and then we've got these sliders that should be familiar to you specular weight the roughness however like I was mentioning is divided up into two separate values for so you have control based on the mask to have different different reference amounts that you can dial in and I do the same thing in the the my Shader for the implementation of the bridge and then on this one here we also have a code weight and coat roughness and then we've got a normal map and the height for the normal map so you can dial that in K so let me actually show you on so here's our license plate and you can see if I come into the height here it's set to 1 but I can make it bigger I can invert it of course you could use any material and it will just you just hook up the connections like I was showing on the initial import of the fbx and then you're Off to the Races the the only thing that's really important is that what I've done here that kind of is not going to be in say like a master Shader from quixel Mega scans is the color spaces if you were going to read it into that you would have to go to all of the orm maps here if I just click on one of them here you can see that this is in srgb space and so you have to go to all of the orm maps and uncheck that and you can you know search here for orm select shift select all of these and go into asset actions and bulk edit via property Matrix and you can just come into here and you could then uncheck all of these all at once but who wants to do that especially when you have not just one asset but a whole bunch of assets you're reading in and so what what this is doing to avoid needing to do that is this coat material takes the aura map which is read again with the srgb ticked on meaning that it's doing a conversion from srgb into linear into the linear working space and so this is inverting that here so here's a node that takes it from linear back into s or GB so it basically undoes the conversion as if it never happened which is the correct way to read in non-color maps maps that are for data information and so that's going into here the green Channel as well as the blue Channel appear and then the the red channel for the occlusion same thing so just a little nice thing to have that you don't have to worry about converting those maps and it just reads everything in it just all correct so let me show you how you bring in this so-called Master material or parent material if you prefer and I prefer so if you just kind of take the U assets here and drag them in to the browser here you're going to get all these errors as you can see so that's not the way you want to do it what you instead want to do is you go to the folder in unreal in the content browser that you want to bring it into right click on it and then you're going to choose show and explore that'll open up another Explorer window and then you can drag your content from one Windows Explorer window to another and as you can see it appears right there in the content browser and then once you've done that then you just less before you read in your asset drag it in and it will assign based on this parent material it'll assign all of these instances for your asset so super cool

Channel: Derek Flood

Views: 9,873

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Id: WqFTYh_KZkQ

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2023