Hey, everybody. I want to let you know about a huge announcement from Epic
Games involving Datasmith, which is their new tool that bridges the gap
between 3d studio max and virtual reality in Unreal Engine. It's a game
changer guys it's gonna change the way you work and it's gonna make it way
easier let's look at their announcement real quick ok here is the announcement
on Unreal Engine comm and it is announcing unreal studio now in open
beta so it's an open beta and the overall project product is actually
called unreal studio and with it comes data Smith which is the tool that
converts all your 3d studio max stuff into things that will work in Unreal
Engine so v-ray materials now convert the array lights will convert pretty
much everything you have in your scene will just convert directly if you export
it through data Smith it exports as a data Smith file and then it imports as a
data Smith file into Unreal Engine and it just kind of works in it's kind of
awesome so all the scripts that we need to use to turn everything into standard
materials and unwrap everything and move everything to the right pivots all that
stuff goes away it is fantastic as far as how much time it saves you here's
some more video this is from the ever Motion site this one I don't know where
it's from but this just shows some sizzle reel stuff here are the different
things that come so data Smith is the importer tool basically it's it's really
a perfect bridge between v-ray and Unreal Engine I've been using it already
this week and it's quite awesome I got to say it lives up to the hype of being
a game changer as far as your workflow goes it comes with learning it comes
with support the learning is awesome too the support I haven't tried out yet the
assets it comes with specific assets for arc vis and it also comes with an
importer for substance designer and substance painter so if you're creating
custom PBR materials in there they can now be directly imported into unreal
engine and the pipeline is cleaned up there so this is showing that any kind
of CAD you're using any kind of Reidy you're using can go through data
Smith and then come it will interpret it translate it into something that works
in Unreal Engine and come across as basically what you intend it to be in
its enriched in its original format so v-ray materials now come across just as
it were in three student max that's the big part for me you don't have to wipe
your materials clean make them into standard and then kind of start from
scratch when you get into unreal also the scaling and the pivot points
all work as you come across which was a huge deal for me as well because that
gets super annoying trying to import everything at the right scale and at the
right pivot point as you guys probably know if you've worked in this workflow
for very long so Dave Smith is a big deal so how do you import it or how do
you how do you get it oh it's open beta right now so if you go to Unreal Engine
comm Enterprise unreal studio you'll see right here get the free beta you'll want
to go here and download unreal studio and what that will do is give you a
download for a brand-new Unreal Engine games launcher so it should say unreal
studio beta here active and once you have that then you can go and you have
to install a beta version of engine number 419 so you can do that by going
to library hitting this install a new version of Unreal Engine and it'll bring
up a tab like this and you can drop down and you will you should be able to see
4.19 preview six and that's what you want to install if you look at installed
plugins here you'll see that unreal data Smith and substance plug-in are
installed already they will automatically install when you install
the engine or you can go down here and see the different plugins that can be
installed you'll want to get this the 3ds max exporter you just hit get it'll
take you to a download page and what that does is it makes it so when you go
to export in 3d studio max you will see a new file type and I think it's called
you DT Smith something something unreal data Smith file type and that's what
you'll want to export as and then you'll see that in unreal you just
import the data Smith file and boom everything works okay so that's how you
get it there's all these learning tools for it now too and by the way as as a
note this is open beta so they say themselves it's not ready for production
it does have some bugs I've been testing it out already and it does have some
bugs there's things that make it crash however it's awesome they recommend
having two versions of the engine and keeping all your old projects in in your
other versions until 4.19 is a product release once that happens the beta will
be over and it will cost I believe 48 dollars a month $49 a month something
like that for me that uses it for commercial purposes that will be totally
worth it because it can save enormous amounts of time it gives you also
support access to their support professional support and learning
resources so that's a pretty big deal too so let's test it out real quick and
see what we can get without any prep to my models let's just go in and see if we
can import it using data Smith okay I have this model here this 3d model and
this is actually created in Corona so I've got Corona materials on it and
let's see how this comes in I'm not gonna adjust anything except maybe get
rid of these Corona proxies down here I'm not sure how those have come in we
can test that later but I would want to bring them in separately anyway I assume
they come in as a mesh but right now there's so many polygons that they
probably yeah slow me down a little bit so from purpose of this video let's get
rid of those and then let's just import this as is into Unreal Engine and see
what happens so all you have to do to export using data Smith is just grab
this and again I haven't made any other adjustments here so let's go to file
export export selected we should have a data Smith in here now actually know
what helps when you're trying to export using data Smith is installing the data
Smith exporter first let's do that okay okay now that I've actually got it
installed let's try the skin select export selected
file-type unreal data submitted okay i'm gonna find a file put that in okay gives
you the option to do the selection or visible are all visible objects in this
case it will make no difference the same thing okay here goes
exporting dave smith doesn't take too long
surprisingly while that's working let's open this thing up launch Unreal Engine
preview 4.19 preview number six okay well will do here's a new project and
we'll have our regular blueprint templates here C++ and then Unreal
studio which is what we want now the product viewer is the only template they
give you right now I'm sure there will probably be more when it's ready to be a
full release what the product viewer does is it allows you to bring in data
Smith info but it has a templates some simplest stuff built into it which
basically every time you hit play it brings up a blurry screen with two
buttons on it that says desktop or vr so you can navigate in either one of those
ways however I haven't actually got that to work yet I'm not sure they've got it
fully up and running at least they haven't explained well how to make it
run because when I go to VR it does not work properly the desktop navigation
does work properly anyway the point is we don't necessarily want that
functionality to be exactly like that and maybe if they get it working better
than I will but for now I'm just gonna go with blank and we'll just call it D
Smith D Smith test okay and create project okay here it is you'll see this
is just a blank scene there's nothing in here except the sky background the
atmospheric fog direct light skylight reflections for your end player start
and there's this new button up here which is import data Smith and let's see
what we dropped down here yeah but we just want this button here import data
Smith we shall go to our files data Smith export experior you data Smith
boom okay put it in the content folder okay actually we can make a new folder
here say mash import or let's just call it meshes it actually will bring in a
bunch of materials too so you know you can see you can bring in your lights
your cameras materials and textures geometry okay I do want to bring in
lights I don't wanna bring in cameras we don't need that and basically the light
will just bring in my son and one cool thing is if you have like a v-ray dome
light in your scene and you bring in your lights it will actually put a
sphere around your whole scene make it and apply your HDR eye to it even and
use that as your background which is quite cool and it'll I believe it'll put
the HDR and you're in a new skylight actor so anyway it's found ways to
translate basically everything it's quite cool so you can see here it comes
it's all coming in Corona materials work just fine v-ray materials work just fine
so my material information all translates which is awesome because you
know that it was basically started from scratch before because you have to
change everything standard material and then in Unreal Engine you have to kind
of wire in a bunch more functionality to make it look realistic but since we've
already made it realistic in v-ray or Corona all that stuff will come across
and you'll see what it looks like it's pretty complicated stuff if you were to
create it from scratch but when it translates directly it's really not that
hard so it's it's a much faster way to get very realistic looking materials
let's put it that way so let's see what this material looks like this this one
is pretty basic so well basic not really not when it translates okay so this is
what deta Smith does it takes a basic material in v-ray and mimics it exactly
by using all the different nodes available in Unreal Engine so it's
actually not that simple in here but it gives you a really realistic material so
no matter what you do with your materials in Corona v-ray it will find a
way to translate it into here and it looks kind of crazy what this is doing
is adding and subtracting and dividing and multiplying all our
different all our different spinners spinner numbers in 3dsmax and giving us
this is for the Finnell effect so it looks kind of crazy but the point is it
gives you directly the material that you had in 3d studio max which is awesome
okay so here's here's my block material and there it is there's all the stuff it
turns your bum maps into normals for you which is fantastic and they saves you
enormous amounts of time there's the texture sample I mean everything about
this is great I love this okay so it's come right in you hit play here we are
looks like one of the materials is struggling or I didn't have a material
assign there I'm not actually sure what that object is at all there you go we're
in Unreal Engine walking around this building literally within seconds of
exporting we're ready to go and you saw what I did for the export I didn't cut
anything out that was all it was so I seen that I had no intention of ever
taking in the VR is basically up and running I'll now have to focus on the
lighting and you'll see that okay my v-ray Sun should be in here my Corona
Sun sorry and it'll be called direct light light source I think that's my son
right there that's my set that's the son I had in 3d studio max I believe one
thing you have to be careful of is if you have certain lights in 3d studio max
they will come across as a duplicate because because they were already
included in the template so like a direct light if it's already in here and
then you import a viewer a Sun or Corona Sun it will now have to direct lights
stuff like that and like I said the dome light if you have that it'll come in and
it will be a duplicate of this skylight here so you got to watch out for that
right now I'm seeing my sky sphere if I turn that off I will still have my
straight up blue behind that which looks more like the corona sky or V race guy
right anyway this thing's basically up and
running now we can take our direct light and start baking our static light into
here making this look realistic you see my glasses working shadows are
working so anyway that's a great out-of-the-box solution and these
materials aren't even super complicated but it still demonstrates how they just
come come right across now I have done this already with some really
complicated interior materials and everything just kind of comes across and
works it's really great and you'll notice here I didn't worry about where
this was placed in world space in 3d studio max but all the pivots are in the
right place okay so that is awesome I can just select these objects and move
them so I never moved them to zero zero or anything like that I never scaled
them everything's working that's still scale that one one and one it's location
is 934 negative two thousand fourth blah blah blah etc but the pivots are in
the right place so just that one thing saves me so much time okay so there you
have it that's how data Smith works that is pretty awesome and now we need now we
can Cohn's concentrate much more on making these good looking images
concentrate on the lighting the light baked making it look realistic because
the materials are basically there now the rest is just tweaking until we get
photo realism so in my opinion this data Smith thing really helps that process
along because I'm not focused on import settings and all that other stuff that
was bogging me down so much so hopefully you guys love this check it out it's
free beta for now I think in November sometime in the upcoming months it will
become a production product and then you will have to pay for it I think it's
worth every penny go check it out see what you think
you