Rebuilding the Cathedral into the Unreal4 engine

If you feel like you're up to the challenge of building your own Ages in Blender or 3ds Max, this is the place for you!

Rebuilding the Cathedral into the Unreal4 engine

Postby dendwaler » Thu Aug 18, 2016 1:34 am

Hi all,
recently i started learning Unreal 4.
I still have to overcome lots of troubles with importing assets in the right way.
Many objects i have , makes use of 3 or even more UV layout channels.
That is not how you are supposed to build in Unreal.
The best way is to keep UV channel 0 for the texturing
and UV channel 1, for the lightmaps.
The lightmaps still have to be build in Blender , but will be painted by Unreal on the available layout space which is made in blender.
Because the neccessary fbx export combines the assets into 1 object with multiple elements , all those elements should have the same channels for texturing and lightmapping.
Thats why i have to change a lot in my blender files, and redo those things.

But now i have imported a first batch of assets and you can already see the potential of Unreal 4.
i know the next picture is not as it should be, but i wanted to share what we can expect once i did it all correct.

Image
Those wonderfull Worlds are called " Ages" , because that is what it takes to build one.



Watch my latest Video Or even better..... watch the Cathedral's Complete Walkthrough made by Suleika!
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Re: Rebuilding the Cathedral into the Unreal4 engine

Postby JanB » Thu Aug 18, 2016 4:24 am

Brighter but very beautiful lightning in the cathedral!
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Re: Rebuilding the Cathedral into the Unreal4 engine

Postby Sirius » Thu Aug 18, 2016 9:39 am

Hehe, sounds like fun !

Personally I'm using Unity a lot currently - mostly at work, but also for making Ages in my spare time. It's quite similar to Unreal, from what I can tell.

Yeah, most modern engines don't use a lot of multilayering, so most of the time you'll need to bake your textures into a single one. You might want to have a look at shaders, though: they allow you to use multitexturing on some objects. Unreal even has a simple graphical editor for shaders, unlike Unity in which you need to write the shader program yourself (very annoying). Might be worth a look.
The sky of my canyon Age uses something like 5-6 animated layers, and I managed to bring it back to life in Unity by writing a shader for it.

Speaking of shaders, both engines also have some very nice image effects - real time ambient occlusion, sun rays, etc.

Is the FBX import that bad ? In Unity it seems a lot more efficient: all objects in the FBX are imported as children to a master empty. This way I just have to export a dozen of areas each into its own FBX file (all areas are on their own Blender layer anyway), and once in Unity all objects and materials are preserved, like so:
Show Spoiler


Anyway, enjoy yourself ! ;)
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