Unreal Engine: Lunchtime Lessons

- [Instructor] Hi, I'm George Maestri. Exporting data from 3ds Max to Unreal just got a little bit better than with the addition of the Datasmith modifier for 3ds Max. Now this allow you to control a number of things on a per-object basis that will make your data flow from 3ds Max to Unreal a little bit better. Let me show you how this works. I'm going to go ahead and just select one of these objects. I'm selecting the barstool. And let's go over to our Modify panel and scroll down until we have Datasmith Attributes. Go ahead and toss that on the top of the stack, and you'll see that we have three options. The first gives you control over your lightmap UVs. So by default, it automatically unwraps and creates a second set of UVs for your lightmap, which is what Unreal normally does. But if we go down here and specify Lightmap Channel, we can actually tell Unreal to use a specific channel that we create in 3ds Max. And this gives you the opportunity to fine-tune and customize your lightmaps on a per-object basis. Now I'm going to go ahead and leave this on Auto Unwrap. Now if we want to, we can also add in collision meshes. So I'm going to go ahead and select this second object here, and let's go ahead and add another Datasmith modifier here. And I'm going to move this box over that object. And in fact, let's go ahead and turn on wireframe so we can position that. So if I have this object selected, I can use what's called a custom collision map, and this allows me to specify a mesh. Now this mesh must follow the guidelines, which means it can't be convex. So something simple like a box, a capsule, or a sphere usually works best. So I'm going to go ahead and pick that geometric object. And now this object is my collision mesh. Now another thing we can do is we can turn the object into bounding box. So I'm going to go ahead and toss another Datasmith on this last barstool here. And we're going to export the geometry. Instead of as a static mesh, we're going to export that as a bounding box. And so this gives you the ability to export bounding boxes if you don't want to use the full mesh. So now that we have all of these controlled, let's go ahead and just do a Export, and I'm going to export this to 01_08. And if it already exists, just go ahead and overwrite it. Now let's hop over to Unreal and import that. So I'm going to go over to Datasmith, and we're going to import that Datasmith file. OK. Let's make sure we have lights and cameras imported. And here we go. Now I have this floor in the way, so I'm going to go ahead and hide that. And you can see that now we've got everything imported. This is imported as a bounding box. We have a custom collision mesh for this. And everything imports properly. So if you want more control over how you transfer your data from 3ds Max into Unreal, go ahead and start using the Unreal Datasmith modifier.