Greetings,
After going through alot of pain and research, I came up with a tool that will make your exporting and importing procedure much easier (at least it did in my case). I'm going to explain it, and if it interests you guys I'm going to donate it for the community.
It's basically a max script which can:
1- Generate UV maps in the second channel for lightmapping. You select all/some objects in your max scene and press one button, it'll just do a Flatten Map command to whatever you selected. I tested this in a big house I made for Archviz, it has around 400 objects, I got my results within 20 seconds roughly. I'm going to need the expert's advice here in what more I can automate to make the UV layout better. You see, I'm just a programmer and quite clueless about these stuff.
2- Export your entire scene in a *.t3d format. This will help you to like copy-paste whatever you have in your max scene to UDK's scene. You don't need to place your static meshes one by one to the scene. I found this useful when you have large scenes, like my case. Yes, I can export the house I have easily with FBX, but to place every object one by one into the scene is real pain and thinking long-term, I will work with big residential projects, I will have thousands of actors, so I had to make this max script to ease the job.
3- Supports instances. You can preserve your instances that you created in max and have them in UDK. You need to do a little trick in the editor, and you're done. The FBX importer that the UDK has doesn't support it, so I had to find a way, and the solution was in the .t3d file format.
There is one minor issue with the generated t3d file, is that it is enclosed with qutation marks. I don't know why max script is doing this, but anyways, I open it up and delete them. It's still a WIP, I need to research this more. One thing to note, you must use max 2011, or 2010 (not tested), because any earlier versions will not import your second UV channel.
So, what do you think?
Hamad
After going through alot of pain and research, I came up with a tool that will make your exporting and importing procedure much easier (at least it did in my case). I'm going to explain it, and if it interests you guys I'm going to donate it for the community.
It's basically a max script which can:
1- Generate UV maps in the second channel for lightmapping. You select all/some objects in your max scene and press one button, it'll just do a Flatten Map command to whatever you selected. I tested this in a big house I made for Archviz, it has around 400 objects, I got my results within 20 seconds roughly. I'm going to need the expert's advice here in what more I can automate to make the UV layout better. You see, I'm just a programmer and quite clueless about these stuff.
2- Export your entire scene in a *.t3d format. This will help you to like copy-paste whatever you have in your max scene to UDK's scene. You don't need to place your static meshes one by one to the scene. I found this useful when you have large scenes, like my case. Yes, I can export the house I have easily with FBX, but to place every object one by one into the scene is real pain and thinking long-term, I will work with big residential projects, I will have thousands of actors, so I had to make this max script to ease the job.
3- Supports instances. You can preserve your instances that you created in max and have them in UDK. You need to do a little trick in the editor, and you're done. The FBX importer that the UDK has doesn't support it, so I had to find a way, and the solution was in the .t3d file format.
There is one minor issue with the generated t3d file, is that it is enclosed with qutation marks. I don't know why max script is doing this, but anyways, I open it up and delete them. It's still a WIP, I need to research this more. One thing to note, you must use max 2011, or 2010 (not tested), because any earlier versions will not import your second UV channel.
So, what do you think?
Hamad
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