3d tour built in Max, ported to Unreal Engine for rendering.

[Tommy L]

https://www.facebook.com/studioinhaus/posts/1038456449629253

Just issued 20 images and 2 tours and a 3 mins 4k animation for this project. Nothing unusual, except using Unreal Engine for rendering the anim frames and spheres for the tour. High res stills were still all done using VRay/PS.

Nice to not have the frame time issue for animation!

[Francisco Penaloza]

So those panoramas are done in Unreal??

I don't see any links for the animation or the still.

Anyways from the panorama, it looks very good!!

I would be very interested to know your workflow to send the Max file to Unreal.

We are at a point in time also that we are thinking to move ahead using Unreal for animations when tight deadlines are upon our projects, it seems like way more effective use of time when at the end you can have still, animations panoramas and possible VR.

[Tommy L]

HI Francisco, yes, the panos were rendered out of UE. The scenes were built in max, rendered in VRay for the stills. Then the scene was ported to UE using Datasmith (Beta). I have not used UE myself, one of my employees did the porting and rendering in UE. And yes, there is no significant rendertime in UE once the scene is baked.

The reason I chose this route was because I wanted a scene with MANY hotspots, so you can stand pretty much anywhere in the interactive. It was a good experiment, but due to the design changes inevitably involved, Im not sure the port/bake part of the job didnt mitigate the rendertime advantage. Just doing the change in max, hit render, wait, might have been more productive.... But the client at the last minute asked if we could do an animation. Being able to just render out the frame sequence quicker than AE can assemble it (at 4k) was quite a nice surprise.

There are still quite a few limitations which I assume will be fixed as the software develops. You cant save the location of 'cameras' for 360 capture. So we could not exactly reproduce the same shots. Also, you are kinda guessing the view height. Not ideal. Also, you cant capture a frame sequence in 360. We could build a 6 camera rig and shoot a cube sequence, but our coding skills are not quite at that level.

 

Anyway, both ourselves and the client were happy. We will continue to use UE and Datasmith, but not for everything as right now its a loss leader in our studio. Until it becomes a fluent skillset like max/vray it wont be profitable, more a future-proofing exercise.

[Francisco Penaloza]

Thanks for the input, I also have access to Data smith but I haven't had the opportunity to try it out really.

I am slammed with projects and some of them are VR presentations, that I am producing now in Stingray, but I would really like to move into Unreal.

Mostly for quality and market share, there are many ready to go product for Unreal, for Stingray is very limited almost none existent and our project does not give us time to in-house modeling furniture and landscaping.

 

Good to know what you found so far.

 

I did give a tried to Data Smith and I remember that if you export the whole scene you could not re-export by parts, you had to do the whole thing again, is that still true??

[Tommy L]

I think yes, you must bake the whole scene. But using 4 or 5 nodes we found that baking the whole apartment would take about 45 mins. When you consider that is then ready to render 60,000pixel wide images, or limitless frames, or push-button pano's, its a fair trade-off.

Forgot to mention, you cant use this as a replacement for VRay in an 'artistic' sense. The output is essentially a print, there's no layers, no channels, no tools for compositing. You have to be happy with the look.

[Lewis Garrison]

They're making Vray for Unreal. Once that comes out you can pretty much do all your rendering, panos and animations all in Unreal.

[Devin Johnston]

Hey Tom the project looks great, I've recently done something similar with Datasmith & Vray and was very impressed with Unreal's quality.

[Chris MacDonald]

Impressive.

 

I've been struggling to get datasmith to work and import anything at all - but it's still in Beta so that's to be expected, I guess. It's just frustrating seeing so many others getting such excellent results and I am not lol.

 

I've only recently had the time to delve into it, so i'm expecting a steep learning curve.

Edited November 8, 2017 by Macker

[James Vella]

jump onto the datasmith forums they will be able to walk you through any troubleshooting.

 

To be honest I only had 1 day to test out the beta, worked great except for a few plugins which were not supported (multitexture was one of them).

 

All my textures/materials ported across well which gave me a good insight as to how the materials work in general in unreal, as this is a more technical process than in 3dsmax.

[Tommy L]

Here' a couple of the renderings out of max/Vray for comparison with the UE results

[Tommy L]

And these are screenshots straight from UE.

Edited November 10, 2017 by Tommy L