Exporting Scenes to Game Engine Workflow
polycounter lvl 2
I have this problem that I have scenes that I want to create, maybe together with colleagues inside of our 3D Programm (Cinema4D) and not directly inside a Game Engine. There are several reasons, one is that it is more flexible so that we can easily export it over to another Engine as well. Especially for the upcoming project we use another engine. Also that scene can be used for animations and maybe offline rendering if required.
Now here is the Workflow that I had so far: Use Instance and xref objects in the scene to build the environment. Then I have a script that replaces all of those objects by null objects (root, pivot etc.) and renames them to whatever they reference to and adding a prefix. So basically I mostly export transform information and just a bit of solid geometry like floor planes, walls and the like. I am even able to split it up in multiple files for instance to have all the detail props seperated. Alternatively detiasl can still be placed in the engine.
Now inside the Engine there has to be a script that creates Prefabs or Blueprints by name accorting to the transforms. Depending on the script you only end up with one additional transform for each object. But at least in Unity then I can even edit the raw file and all the transforms will update. Only adding and removing objects is a bit more complex.
So actually I have a solution but I want to know how you handle things like that and if it can be improved. I so far only worked with the Unity engine and maybe Unreal or the FBX format itself has something that I don't know. I know that FBX supports instances but thsoe are only mesh instances and don't help me to place Prefabs or Blueprints.
Now here is the Workflow that I had so far: Use Instance and xref objects in the scene to build the environment. Then I have a script that replaces all of those objects by null objects (root, pivot etc.) and renames them to whatever they reference to and adding a prefix. So basically I mostly export transform information and just a bit of solid geometry like floor planes, walls and the like. I am even able to split it up in multiple files for instance to have all the detail props seperated. Alternatively detiasl can still be placed in the engine.
Now inside the Engine there has to be a script that creates Prefabs or Blueprints by name accorting to the transforms. Depending on the script you only end up with one additional transform for each object. But at least in Unity then I can even edit the raw file and all the transforms will update. Only adding and removing objects is a bit more complex.
So actually I have a solution but I want to know how you handle things like that and if it can be improved. I so far only worked with the Unity engine and maybe Unreal or the FBX format itself has something that I don't know. I know that FBX supports instances but thsoe are only mesh instances and don't help me to place Prefabs or Blueprints.
Replies
I've done things where i export a load of locators to fbx and use a blueprint to place actors at those locators but couldn't find a way to automatically tell ue4 which actors I wanted to place - as far as I could tell there was no way to pull in a list of names from a file and create actors based on that.
I've not looked at it in real depth though so it's conceivable I missed something.