Weekend project: added a new shading model that includes a retroreflective component.
Category: Tools
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Blender to Unreal FBX + T3D exporter with instancing
Blender: these objects share linked mesh data 
Unreal: import one FBX, paste T3D as instances I wrote a very simple Blender to Unreal exporter because I couldn’t find one that exported scenes to FBX and T3D at the same time. The purpose is to export only unique data to FBX, instead of all object data, this way duplicates (with linked data in blender) are preserved and objects can be pasted in to Unreal after placement was done in Blender. Now I can export a whole scene at once and still benefit from the efficiency of linked data, without needing to reconstruct object placement manually in Unreal.
It’s no Datasmith, but this is all I need for testing and it works with Blender.
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Natural History: Lightmap Test
demo screenshot This post will be a long one, so I wont get it all at once…updates to come.
First off— so I wanted to create a test environment with lightmaps. I downloaded the Natural History Museum model from 3dRender.com to start, and the laid out the UVs in a reasonable manner. At first I thought I could get away with one or two maps, but there is just way too much surface area for the quality I wanted to achieve, and so came 23 UV maps.
Next I got a reasonable balance of lighting that I was looking for. Based on Mental Ray’s physical sun & sky system, with portal lights for all the main windows, I did a sort of quick set up.
Now in traditional rendering, separate passes for direct and indirect are no problem. I wanted that, but also to have separate passes for each main light source. Ideally, the renderer should spit this all out without much trouble, but this is Maya/Mental Ray, so it wasn’t going to be easy. Additionally, I wanted to bake this all to lightmaps (for real-time rendering later). Rendering Direct/Indirect is simple enough, but the remaining problem here was twofold:- Rendering separate passes for each main lightsource (Sun, Sky, artificial)
- lightmaps dont allow membership or layer overrides.
Although lightmap sets are a special form of object sets, they’re extremely limited. I wanted to avoid creating 7 of separate scenes every time I wanted to render ( since I had 3 light sources, direct and indirect for each, and alpha). For this I created a MEL script node… (explanation to come)
So I got something like this (top center and top-right are composite maps):
Lighting / Render Passes After balancing the passes in Nuke, here’s a few screenshots of the results back in the maya viewport:
I wanted to try a quick test with an alternate lighting setup, and I was inspired after seeing the new James Bond: Skyfall movie. Here are the preview-quality results.
This test was a great opportunity for some scripting, and there’s more I’d like to play around with as far as pipeline. Also would be a good chance to explore the API to render out passes and light groups all at once, rather than 7 times. Perhaps Illuminate Labs/Autodesk Turtle would be better suited for something like this.
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MentalRay Render Proxy
This is a simple tool for MentalRay Render Proxies that I added some features to:
- custom output path
- inherit shaders
- maintains set memberships
- swap between original and proxy
Any object can be selected and swapped between high and low resolution. This is really useful when getting lost in a mass of bounding boxes that you dont have time to rename and create appropriate proxy cages for. The new object inherits attributes as well as materials and set associations. This way objectSets for pipeline use don’t get broken.
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