Using maya as a game editor for environment art

chai45

I was watching a talk by Stephen McAuley, technical director at Santa Monica Studio discussing their approach to game editors and how they use Maya as their game editor in conjunction with their engine. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5VeATrOST4&t=2684s

Apparently there are many benefits with working with Maya as a level editor (at least for animation). And the one thing that has stood out to me is that some of the games with the best environment art in the industry are made by studios that exclusively use Maya as their game editors (Santa Monica Studio, Naughty Dog).

I know that there´s livelink which is pretty useful for animation, but does that translate to Environment Art? As an environment artist I usually find the exporting/importing pipeline from Maya to Unreal Engine a bit tiring and not that efficient. I feel like I have a lot more control and freedom building and editing levels within Maya, only to "destroy" it and reassemble it in Unreal without the level of control that Maya gives me.

Is there a way to blend Maya and Unreal Engine with a seamless environment art pipeline like Santa Monica or Naughty Dog do with their game engines? Are there even benefits for doing that? Because Unreal does have a level editor so am I just making things for myself more difficult for no apparent reason?

God I just wish there was a LiveLink with Maya but for environment art.

Eric Chadwick

Well, for character animation usually you don't have the same kind of strict limits as you have for environment art, so it's a different issue in many ways.

For environments, usually you have to pay close attention to reusing assets and materials/textures as much as possible, so you don't blow the memory budget or kill frame rate with sudden slowdowns while the player has to wait for things to load.

So instantiating things, and controlling sight lines and player progression all become really important, and intertwined. None of that can be replicated easily in a DCC like Maya.

I can't speak for those studios, but there are a bunch of considerations for env art that need to remain really fluid throughout development. You make a gray-boxed playable blockout, refine things thru playtesting, then start replacing with finished art. Profiling the load times and framerate, optimizing and cleaning things up. 

It's a team effort and very iterative IMHO. So if you were to try to bottleneck that with a single Maya scene file, it would become very difficult very quickly to keep it moving forwards. 

chai45

It's a team effort and very iterative IMHO. So if you were to try to bottleneck that with a single Maya scene file, it would become very difficult very quickly to keep it moving forwards. 

Of course, I know the environment art pipeline and everything to do with modularity/asset reuse. I just wonder if I could make the exporting/importing pipeline smoother.

If LiveLink is useful not only for animation, then here are the list of changes in Maya that I would love to do instantly see reflected inside Unreal Engine:

• Object transformations
• Instancing
• Material Editing
• Lighting changes

I know these studios work with Maya as their game editor because it is a "universal" environment that any game artist knows, and also because their game engines don´t have level editors.

I would love to use Unreal Engine as essentially just "a render window" if that makes sense lmao