Unreal Studio, Marc Petit

[NNois]

What sh*tload of bullsh*t Marc Petit is doing with Unreal ?

I'm very angry just have a look at the video on this page. That's starting to look very familiar
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog ... -open-beta

Will an exporter plugin can bring good assets to a game engine ? seriously ? no. Game assets needs to be modeled carefully with expertise. How can a compagny like Epic could sell a 1/2 plugins just to capture more customers ?
Will an exporter plugin can create good and effective UVs for a game engine ? no, Game assets needs to be prepared by talented people and not by Sketshup people ! what a joke...

Will Marc Petit starting to workaround Unreal Engine to make money with the ME business ? yes I think so.



I mean, don't get me wrong but I mean, we have to say things no ? Unreal engine is so cool, how they can fall in that marketing crap ?

[luceric]

I'm all for bashing Marc Petit, but what are you talking about ? Big ArchViz firms have been using game engine for years, and I would have the humility to think Motiva, the realtime viz company that develops the plugin, and Epic, knows their stuff.

[NNois]

Heah, but the whole selling point is "just don't care about your meshes or the way your scene is setup, our magic plugin will bring that in our game engine and it will shine"...

I can understand automatic uv can do great things, substances can do magic too but common saying it's an "Automagic" plugin is a joke.
First because it's targeted to people who even don't know how to make 3d models

[AceMastermind]

I'm all for bashing Marc Petit, but what are you talking about ?

I nearly fell out of my chair when i read that.

[Bellsey]

I think I'll chime in here, because we've been working alot with Unreal on this and like Mackevision we've been using alot or the Datasmith workflow and plugins.

It's too much of a sweeping statement to say Unreal Studio and its plugins are aimed at people who don't know how to make 3d models. My company and people like Mackevision work alot with automotive and have done for years. And like many, we've also been looking at realtime game engines. The challenge is that most of work and models have derived from CAD. Much of our end product isn't modelled in the same way car models are produced for Forza, or Gran Turismo, the complexity and sheer amount of data just doesn't allow for us to manually model or retopo everything. There are many tools out there that can and will tessellate CAD data and we use them, there's even software like Vred and Deltagen that do this and have been in automotive for years and they've had some advantage because they're able to directly read in CAD data, maintain its data structure and tessellate on the fly. Game engines, haven't really been able to do this, until now.

Now that Unreal have started to allow this, its opens up alot of opportunities and possibilities. We've been trying the Datasmith worfkow for a while now and we're very impressed by it.

[NNois]

It's too much of a sweeping statement to say Unreal Studio and its plugins are aimed at people who don't know how to make 3d models.

I'm all for good tools, and the one you talk (vred, deltagen) are very cool, but what I saw on the presentation video with Mr Petit is another story, they speaks about the simplicity about how we can convert to Unreal with 70% of the work done. And they have a Sketchup Plugin ! you can't tell me sketchup guy knows how to model and a convertion of that can produce good results.
But you're right I should have tested it before, but what I see here is a "send to" button without any option, how could you generate good texture without any controls on your imported cad model ?

[Bellsey]

Much is workflow is similar to what we do previously when demoing Mudbox. You could take a mesh only, and dump it into Mudbox, then add some auto UVs (soft also has a similar feature, if I recall). The UVs will be ugly, and by no means as good as the result you would get it too the time to unwrap them correctly, but they were good enough to start applying shaders and textures. And that's the real point, you can actually make a start so you can see something. For some that's all they might ever need.

When my teams starts pulling CAD for the first time, we can get stuff into UE4 and start to build a picture of what we're going to need. We even use this early data for some prep work, but ultimately we do process the data and get some proper UV maps working.