Exporting XSI to ActorX.

[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

[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...

[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

[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]

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]

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]

RT that was very close to what I want to do, Now if you did an export after you did
the Freeze Transform would the WHOLE floor with assets come in as it is in XSI?
And would it be ready to apply the mat's to the different peices of the clustered assets?

To be sure that your geometry is correctly sized just unhide all your meshes in your scene ( of course, after you are sure that you're scene is properly scaled ), select all of them and choose Transform>Freeze all transform, this will reset the transforms for all the objects in your scene, so you do that once, you don't need to think about that anymore.

About the materials, I'm not sure I get the question, but if you setup the clusters for your meshes you're ok ( doesn't matter if you hit the freeze transform button previously or after you did the clusters ).
The main problem with materials is that you have different materials on your mesh, but this doesn't mean that the settings that you had in XSI are the same when you import the geometry into UDK, because is the material that gives all the information to your mesh.
This mean that, once you import the mesh into UDK, you have the ability to assign to each piece a different material, but you have to setup manually their properties ( texture coordinates aka tilling, normal maps, and so on... )

So right now when you export a mesh from XSI you'll have only a mesh, but not the material, so for each material that you want to create you need to import all the textures you need...this is really time consuming, I really hope that the guys from Epic will do an update version of ActorX with this features!

@NeptuneImaging: working right now, but I think that next year I'll check the results!

Happy new year

Edit: I just tried to import a biped dude from 3ds, it will recognize all the animations, but the main problem is that XSI doesn't recognize biped bones but only nulls, so if I run the animation the only thing you see are some nulls moving...that's it...

[polix]

RT that was very close to what I want to do, Now if you did an export after you did
the Freeze Transform would the WHOLE floor with assets come in as it is in XSI?
And would it be ready to apply the mat's to the different peices of the clustered assets?

[NeptuneImaging]

Let me know if that works... i am redoing my character model so that I can use my own rig...

[RT-Visualization]

That is a nice video...i would love to find out how to properly get animated models... XSI is my main package to work with...

Thanks, just for a trial I downloaded the U3male.,ax that you can find in the documentation and I would like to do some experiment with that...
What I mean is that you can export all your properties between 3d max and XSI using Crosswalk, so basically if is working properly in 3ds is gonna work inside XSI.
I still have a couple of trial days for 3ds so I'm going to try if is working and, if it will work, you can be sure that I'll share something

And, to see which one works best, I will use .ASE and .DAE, let's hope that both of them works properly!

[NeptuneImaging]

That is a nice video...i would love to find out how to properly get animated models... XSI is my main package to work with...

[RT-Visualization]

If it can help I did this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMTXO2QCi90

Working for Architectural Visualization in UDK is a bit tricky, because the engine give it best with "dirt" settings, and to achieve a good visual result it will take a bit, right now I'm just testing which can be a good workflow for import the meshes and work with UDK...

I figured out that right now the best way to have nicer results, especially if you import large buildings with lots of details inside, is to create the interiors walls ( and if you can outside as well ) using BSP geometry, mainly because BSP geometry looks much nicer that imported geometry, especially the behaviour of the materials is better with them...

If you're using Lightmass and ambient occlusion you'll gonna have huge problems due to the geometry structure, UV and materials that react ( don't know why ) in a different way of different meshes, so unless your geometry is almost perfect, you're going to have problems...it works fine with more complicated objects ( tested on tables, chairs, couch sets, and is fine... )

Anyway if I make some good progress with my experiments I'll upload some tutorials about that

[polix]

woot thank you, looking forward to seeing how to get it done.

[NeptuneImaging]

Part of the issue you will have to get around is building the buildings with the BSP brushes

[NeptuneImaging]

I will find this out on my next project...I am working on an arena and it will make great use of tilelable textures. I will have to show you guys how I do it