How to transfer scene from 3ds Max to Unreal Engine - Set light, material and render in 20 minutes

Hi everyone! In this video we'll consider Unreal Engine, install and use the Datasmith plugin, we'll configure Realtime GI, finalize the materials and make the final render. So, what awaits you in this video? We'll install and use the plugin to transfer models to the engine. We'll transfer the model from 3ds Max to Unreal. For lighting we'll use HDRI and additional light sources. We'll use cameras to fixate the frame. We'll adjust the focus on the After that, let's take out the global lighting settings. We'll set the final quality and run the render. The first thing we need to do is to download the Datasmith plugin. We go to the Epic Games official site and download the plugin, which will transfer any geometry and materials from 3ds Max to Unreal. The plugin is called Datasmith and under the video in the description I will leave a link to the official page for downloading the installer. Install Datasmith for the version of Unreal Engine you are currently working in. We select and download. We specify the save location. Click save. After the file is downloaded, we run it. I have already installed the plugin. I will show you a screenshot. Select the version of 3ds Max and click install. We run launcher, go to library and then click on launch. In the next window select games, next, blank level. Here we select no starter content and turn on ray tracing. We name the project and create it. Now we can enable Datasmith. Go to plugins, built-in, search for Datasmith and there is Datasmith importer at the very end of the list. Enabled. Then click on restart now. The project file will reboot. Datasmith is now available. Now I have to say a little about navigation. Navigation is carried out while holding the mouse button, just like in the game. You can change the speed of movement. For example, I did two times slower. Then we go to the project settings. Here we need to select windows and install DirectX 12. This is necessary for RTX to work. Also check if ray tracing is ticked. If you specified when creating the project that ray tracing will be enabled, then this check mark is ticked by default, but check it out. Next we press ctrl plus s, name our level and click save. Here we have it. Next we go into the settings of the project, the map tab, select this level which we just created. Further we will transfer this model. Open it in 3ds max. From the side front view holding the shift, I will create a line. We create such a corner. This is our future substrate. We align the bottom line. This will be the floor along the bottom of the model. And you can apply extrude. We assign extrude. I think 5000 will be enough. It can be a little more, 8000 for example. And we center our background regarding the model. Then we apply a chamfer in order to smooth the corner. By eye we approximately set about 1700. It is desirable that there was an even value of the segments. Well that's how it will look like in Unreal. We can export the file. Click export. Next we select the type. This is Unreal Datasmith. Enter any name, a save location, save. Here we select everything by default, ok. We open the previously created level. Delete everything that is not needed. Yes all. Then we keep our level, our changes. We go into Datasmith. Select the file that we just saved. Here click ok. Here by default lightmass generation is already turned off, but just in case check. We don't need lights, cameras and animations. We transfer only the geometry and materials. The transferring takes some time. And here is our model we have just seen in 3ds max. Our substrate and the model itself. Next we go to world settings and forcibly turn off the saving of lightmass. That is initially we have some kind of texture or loosely speaking it is assigned. We click build at the top. The overall whitish tint of the model has disappeared. We will use this HDRI for global lighting. I save it in HDRI. After import select skylight, specified HDRI and assign it. That is either with the transfer or select it and click on the arrow below the list. Next we need a post process. Just write post on the left. The post process is highlighted. In the settings of the post process there is such a checkmark like unlimited action of this post process. Now we can also turn on global lighting. There is final gather here. We will use it but this is not the final quality. Brute force it will be the result. This is the best quality. Well now we turn on the settings but don't change them. Well let's now highlight the skylight again and here we set 5 of intensity. It's measured in candelas. We set the HDRI quality to 1024 and let's try to rotate. Here you can see that the light reacts in the same way as in the classical renders. The nature of lighting immediately changes. I'm looking for an appropriate value. 230 will be acceptable for our scene. Then with the right button we click on the content. Create the material. We can call it just back. This is our material of the substrate. We hold the number one and press the left mouse button. A constant is created. Zero is black material. Black color and one is white. We create one more constant. Zero is the maximum reflection and one is the maximum roughness. We apply the material by simply dragging it to the object we need. In this case it is a substrate. Next we enter light on the left. Select rectangular. That is the rect light. We just transfer and start to rotate it. These same hotkeys W, E and R work here as On the right I leave intensity the same but I only change the temperature to 3000. Well respectively this is a warm shade of our light. Holding shift and alt I transfer the object. Our navigation, that's our camera, is transferred together with copying. This is a very convenient feature in Unreal. We set 5 in candelas of intensity. Let's increase the temperature up to 15 000. The same tools here they are. Do you see? Rotation, scaling, moving. Work faster with the hotkeys. While holding alt I already copied the third light. Rect light is the third and I will put it for backlighting. Camera movement I reduce twice. Now it's two because the navigation flies away. There is a significant camera's displacement. I'm looking for the position of our background light. Let's put 10 candelas of intensity and make a neutral white balance. 6 500 candelas of temperature. Let's show all four windows. Go to the top and now I'll put the camera. Again on the left we enter the camera into the search and simply rotate it. It is easiest to do in the top view. As you can see the default here is rotation in steps. It's easy for us to immediately turn 90 or 180 degrees. We are looking for camera position. Next I will move to the perspective. We need to switch to the view from the camera. For this we need to enter the camera itself and then after that switch to the perspective. It worked that way. In order for this to start working like this we must have a perspective and a camera should be selected. The same navigation is in the view without a camera is carried out in Unreal in the same way. Holding the right button we use the same keys. It is convenient for me to see the perspective view and the right side view from the camera. That is I move the light on the left and on the right I immediately see the result. Now do not pay attention to the fact that the materials are not exactly the ones that need and the light is not fully tuned. Now we are working on it. Next we choose the camera in outliner. Next are the focus settings. Then in focus method we select tracking. Then in the track and focus settings we click on the pipette and select the object on which our camera will focus. It's great including for animation when our camera will be fixed on one of the objects. We go to the post process and turn on the ray tracing reflections now. That is before that global settings work for us and now we include reflection on ray tracing. A little higher in the reflections we need to turn on type. We already have ray tracing. Without going into details we will put two on maximum bounces and we will put three on quality samples per pixel. We select all positions for rect light and put eight for ray tracing. It is the quality of lighting. Next select one of our leaves, go up to the materials, open the material and here for fresnel we set zero and control our reflection with the help of reflection glossiness. Here I made our leaf a little more matte so that it wasn't so glossy and at the top we put a check mark in diffuse. It opens and we click on the picture two times. I would make a leaf lighter because the material of the leaf is quite dark. I just want to make it lighter. Let me increase brightness two more times that is up to three. Much better now. Then I save. I close our tab. That's it. The leaf material is finished. We choose a cash paw. We go into the cash paw material. I moved the tab to immediately observe the result. See what happens directly when this material changes. I'll leave fresnel quite a bit. At value one there is no reflection. There is one thousandth but it's big enough and one ten thousandth is what we need now. Normal flatness. The bigger the value before one the lower is the value of bump. 0.2 it is closer to zero. It is a large amount of bump. 0.85 or even let's set more. 0.95 that is less bump but it's still presence. There are also negative values that is if we even go to minus then bump will work in the opposite direction. Let's continue with the selected values and edit our texture. I will make brightness a little brighter. Well and I think all the indicators are familiar to you. Let's make it a little lighter. If you are unfamiliar with these values then just change them and see what their effect. It is highly responsive mechanism. This mechanism is comparable for example with the corona color corrector or with the standard color corrector. Well let me turn off the grid because it slightly overlaps our floor and distracted me. Let's go back to the post process. Here we will put percentage put on based on the capabilities of your video card. For example I have 1080 and for such a simple picture I can put 300. This value helps to increase the quality of the picture. In fact our image is three times larger. Press the tilt button, type sharpen, press space then number three and enter. Thus we increase the sharpness. We can leave sphere reflection capture in the scene as a template so that in the future we make to bake if we want. Then we create animation, sequencer, level sequence, select the cutter and then select the camera that we created before. Click on the animation creation button. I will choose png. I set 4k quality then there is also custom with 8k limit but it's more than enough. There are also topaz gigapixel that can increase even beyond 8k so there are no problems with the limits. So we indicate one frame in the animation that is we will be rendering from zero to first frame. We save and specify the location to save to where our picture will be saved. Capture, save. Probably you can already stop saving our render because it is dark. That is when you see this you will have the same result but this is not we need. We have a bright picture. Why is this happening? There are many reasons. We will not go into details. Just want to show you. The first is that the quality of global lighting is not very good. The second the picture is dark. It doesn't match with the light result. In the post process there will be one for both minimum brightness and maximum brightness. For exposure compensation we will set 3. It will be the same result but now this result will be fixed for the camera. That is it will not change depending on the distance. Let's say so. Besides if you noticed I don't know if this was visible in a small window but several positions were included by default. Bloom that is a glow was turned on. Also after exposure was turned on and other such things were assigned to the whole scene by default. We have now disabled it. We start the sequencer again and run the render. On the left in the window we saw that the render is already bright. It's great. Here is our result but we still have spots and we get rid of them as follows. We go into the global lighting settings, select brute force. This means that the brute force is the best quality. Next and the quality samples per pixel will be 16. This is more than enough. For the interior you can even put less because there will be more load. For subject lighting this is excellent and we are doing capture again. It's all done. We are opening the image and view the result. The neat result. However we can see that for some reason the global settings are not working properly and therefore the leaves in the image are black. This sometimes happens. So how to deal with this? Ray tracing, point, enter skylight. Then number one that is yes. So we turn on the light and you can see how it immediately became brighter here. Select skylight and here we need to put some lower value. Let's start with the number one. Let's do less for example half the size. You can leave it like that but I want to make literally a little backlight. Let's see how HDRI affects our lighting. So I just want to backlight the leaves a little bit so that there is both their contrast and the geometry is visible here at the same time. We start again rendering, capture, then save if necessary. I leave full HD. Now we can see the image before and after with skylight turned on. Done. The result is quite acceptable. There's only one moment. We see anti-aliasing. It doesn't work very well. That's why I'm just demonstrating that we need to increase our percentage. So we have more simply full HD but the Unreal increases the picture three times and zooms it up to full HD. So in the post process we find the percentage, put a checkmark here and enter 150%. It will be good. I can increase up to 300 on one frame for this scene. That is triple the amount of percentage. Now we enter sharpen and increase the amount three times. This amount is appropriate here. We launch the sequencer and render. Capture movie. All is set up. Saving occurs in one folder that we need. There will be a little longer because it is 4k and we have increased the image in percentage three times and we see the difference. Here we have the state of the image before. Now it has 300%. The quality is better, isn't it? There is no anti-aliasing but there are sharper shadows, less noise and small details are more elaborated. Thank you all for your attention. Subscribe, put likes and ask in the comments if something is not clear. If you are interested and you will react to this video, I will continue to record such videos to consider how to use Unreal. Bye everyone and see you soon!