Exporting XSI to ActorX.

[polix]

Wow we are beginning to think that UDK wont do what we want to do with out a GREAT
deal of pain and time being introduced into the pipeline.
I can not see why anyone would want you to Build and asset like a building in XSI/Maya
and then export it out. Only to import it into UDK as many hundreds/thousands of parts
THEN to have your team RE-Apply the mats and re-orentate them if needed.
What a major MAJOR pain this would be.
Are we missing something here? Is this the proper pipeline to get BUILDING assets into
UDK?

[RT-Visualization]

Wow we are beginning to think that UDK wont do what we want to do with out a GREAT
deal of pain and time being introduced into the pipeline.
I can not see why anyone would want you to Build and asset like a building in XSI/Maya
and then export it out. Only to import it into UDK as many hundreds/thousands of parts
THEN to have your team RE-Apply the mats and re-orentate them if needed.
What a major MAJOR pain this would be.
Are we missing something here? Is this the proper pipeline to get BUILDING assets into
UDK?

This is the 4th engine that I'm using, and for each one ( almost ) the process is always the same, that is export your meshes, import into your engine, create your material within the engine and then apply to it...
And is not for buildings only, is for everything you import into UDK, but, as I said, even with other engines the process is the same...
I don't know how good is the export with 3ds, but I suppose that the process is the same, basically because you need to setup all your materials inside the engine, because no existing plugin will export the settings that you're using inside XSI, because they only exist within XSI! the shaders that you've created inside XSI is not considered at all, because XSI and UDK "speaks different languages"...

I tried to work with the Cryengine as well, the good parts is that the plugin for XSI allows you to convert your materials into a Cryengine shader...but it will only recognize the diffuse map, all the other settings ( specular, normals, tilling ) are not considered at all, so once you export your mesh into the Cryengine you're in the same situation as you export a mesh and import it into UDK or whatever is your engine...

I guess we'll need a real-time engine inside XSI

[polix]

We evaluated engines like Unity, T3D, Unigine, V3D all of these allow you to at least import your Buildings, Weapons, Ships and Armor all as 1 object and allow you to either
map the mats/textures on to them or import them at the time of import.
Now without any argue UDK is one of the most wyckyd engines we have laid our hands
on. (Did not get to play with the Cry or Dun engine much).
But being able to get our assets in at lease SEMI-painlessly would make it all better.
But we can only hope hehehe.

[RT-Visualization]

We evaluated engines like Unity, T3D, Unigine, V3D all of these allow you to at least import your Buildings, Weapons, Ships and Armor all as 1 object and allow you to either
map the mats/textures on to them or import them at the time of import.
Now without any argue UDK is one of the most wyckyd engines we have laid our hands
on. (Did not get to play with the Cry or Dun engine much).
But being able to get our assets in at lease SEMI-painlessly would make it all better.
But we can only hope hehehe.

If you mean the export issue, yeah, that is really annoying...but you can actually avoid the problem of the import by using collada...but if you have 300 objects in your scene and you export all of them at once, you're content browser will be full of objects with no recognizable names ( check the tutorial ).
Anyway yeah, UDK is not so "friendly" in terms of importing ( either meshes of textures ), but since now is available for free I hope that they'll make things easier for us, since I saw at least 20 thread about errors on import the geometry...

But is true that most of the studios that use UDK have they're own pipeline, that includes lots of useful plugin to export meshes from 3d apps ( I recall a specific plugin that was developed in 3d max when they made Gears of War ) that allows you to do lots of nice things ( export diffuse, normal, specular map at once )...

Well, I think that is better to make some request directly to the guys at Epic and hope for the best

[NeptuneImaging]

A nice update for ActorX for XSI would be cool too (I don't own Soft 2010)... I have also never used collada for importing my character models... i want to test it but it would not be fun if things were crazy like that...

[jetstone]

nice thread you guys got going. I really enjoyed all the links to tutorials you guys have done.

I know this does not directly address the issue with materials but I though I would throw it out there.
To skip the manual process of reconnecting Unreal materials to your imported mesh from XSI in the UnrealEd you can do the following:
1. Create all of your Unreal materials in the UnrealEd before any import of your meshes created in XSI
a. When creating you Unreal materials you want to make sure that your Unreal material names matches the names of the material names applied to the mesh you have created with XSI.
2. Import your static or enveloped meshes into Unreal editor.
a. By doing this after you a have created the respective Unreal materials to match the ones created in XSI you are letting the Unreal editor to all the work of material assignment.
Notes:
I suggest creating a standard naming convention for your materials in XSI giving them a prefix or suffix so that you can have a direct correlation to UnrealEd and stay organized and don’t have bunch of materials named “material1...etc”
If you have a programmer available you can work on some lower level solutions with the Unreal source to improve the whole material creation process.

Also I would recommend looking at Crosswalk 4.0 and up because the FBX plugin now uses the latest FBX library (2010.0)
Using the FBX format is the method moving forward for Autodesk products to Unreal.

UDK FBX news
udk.com/news-beta-mar2010

UDK FBX user guide
udn.epicgames.com/Three/FBXImporting.html

Autodesk news
area.autodesk.com/fbx2011