This tutorial will cover the basics on how to export a model from 3ds Max and import it into Unreal 3. Import your textures and create a material and apply it to your mesh.
Tools Needed:
-3ds Max or Maya (This tutorial is Max based)
-Unreal 3 Engine or the Roboblitz Editor
-Photoshop
I will assume that you already have a model with textures ready.
To begin with there are a few things that help with Unreal 3 based content to help things run a bit smoother.
- Use the least amount of smoothing groups as you can. Usually I try to get everything down to 1 but when you have a 90 degree angle you usually have to use a second one.
- No overlapping uvs when you create the normal maps, ao, etc. If you have to overlap stuff then move the pieces that overlap out of the grid. (I use chuggnuts uv tools for this)
- Your collision mesh should be as little triangles (polys) as possible and is used for player and vehicle collision. So you are able to eliminate tiny pieces of the model to optimize it as much as possible. Also be sure that if you have to have multiple primitives that they do not overlap as this will create a much higher polygon count when the engine attempts to split it up.
(The collision mesh made in this tutorial is not optimized and was made just for a quick mesh to show naming conventions. I will have a tutorial on creating collision meshes for UE3 later.)
- When in the editor. Save and save often. Sucks to have spent all kinds of time tweaking materials and have it crash on you and lose everything. Notes are good ideas as well.
In max working in layers is the easiest way to keep yourself from going crazy when you have a ton of different objects and pieces of models and keeping your naming conventions up so you aren't trying to figure out what object134 or cylinder43 is and what it does for your model.
Here you can see my layers labeled for my game model and my collision model. Collision models should start with UCX_
Here is what my collision mesh looks like compared to the game mesh.
So to get ready to export the game mesh and collision mesh should both be in the center of the grid with the pivot points at (0,0,0) and in the middle of the mesh. (Though this can be changed for certain things depending on what the object is.)
Select your game model and collision mesh and export selected and choose *.ASE file type and match the settings below.
Ok now your mesh is ready to be imported into Unreal 3.
So let’s open the editor now and import our mesh and texture files.
Find the *.ASE file you created earlier and click open to import it.
Name your package.
In the Group area you can create folders within your package and separate the Textures from Meshes if you want. For this tutorial I'm just going to put everything into one single package.
Hit OK to move on.
Now select your package from the left hand side and you should see your mesh in the window with no textures applied.
Now let’s import our texture files so we can create our materials.
We import all of our texture files like we did with our mesh EXCEPT with our normal map we will change the CompressionSettings to TC_NormalMap instead of TC_Default.
