Import of thousands assets

[demostenes]

We are now importing our asset library to Unigine. We have 2500+ meshes, 7000+ textures, etc...so lots of work. We are missing functionality of automatical assigning materials to objects, it is very time consuming to manually create material for each each texture and assigning it to object.

 

I ve noticed functionality "node export" in 3ds max exporter, which generates node file and .mat. Probably by small modification we can achieve merging of this .mat file with material library and so we dont have to create materials by hand (98% will be diffuse+normal anyway, so exceptions can be easily handled manually) and by having node we dont have to assign material manually. So HUGE time saver.

 

Is this approach correct, or there is aleady some solution? Or are you planning some update of import process, which would allow to automatically assign material, if requested texture (and so material) is already in project library? Indeed automatical process is not 100% reliable, but it is very easy to manually correct some exceptions (particular object needs some exotic shader and so it needs its own material for existing texture), instead of manually doing all asigning. Thanks.

[steve.brodie]

Can i ask what engine you are moving from demostenes? Our coder has modified the max export script to do some something quite similar to what you require. Will all of your assets be in one 3dsmax file before export?

[jiri.wallenfels]

edit, not actual

[demostenes]

Can i ask what engine you are moving from demostenes? Our coder has modified the max export script to do some something quite similar to what you require. Will all of your assets be in one 3dsmax file before export?

 

 

We are moving from Unity3D. We have assets as separate files mostly in fbx, sometimes in obj format. All LODs are separate files too. But generally not big problem to export group/pack of assets from Unity as one .obj huge file and do some batch export on 3dsmax side. So we can take our model+lods in Unity (we have it in one prefab, so batch export is no problem), export as one .obj file and now we only need to automatize max2unigine part.

[manguste]

Node exporter helps in case a huge scene needs to be exported into separate meshes. In case assets are in separate files, you'll need to modify our scripts or create your one, I'm afraid.

[steve.brodie]

Sounds like you need some batching script for max

 

Maybe this could help as a starting point

http://paulneale.com/scripts/batchItMax/batchItMax.htm

 

Also there are the Autodesk FBX Converter tools that do batch conversion between FBX and obj

[demostenes]

Sounds like you need some batching script for max Maybe this could help as a starting point http://paulneale.com/scripts/batchItMax/batchItMax.htm Also there are the Autodesk FBX Converter tools that do batch conversion between FBX and obj

 

Thanks. But generally part from fbx (unity) to max is no problem. Bigger issue is how to automatically generate materials and asigning them to surfaces in Unigine, because doing it manually would take few months. We will try to script something (automated creation of material, automated assigning material...).

[ulf.schroeter]

We are moving from Unity3D.

Can you comment on the main reasons for switching from Unity3D to UNIGINE ? Unity3D seems to be quite a very powerful engine.

[demostenes]

Can you comment on the main reasons for switching from Unity3D to UNIGINE ? Unity3D seems to be quite a very powerful engine.

 

The biggest issue is stability with large projects. Memory leaks almost in everything, shadow artefacts and blinking in deffered mode...Our world builders had out of memory crash 20x per hour (it was special world building project only with assets, not a line of custom code). Official asset server is corupting data, it crashes....(it is aditional $500 plugin). Umbra occlusion system is not properly working after cca 2 years after release (crashes, ocluded scene is slower than not ocluded....). Until recently it wasnt even possible to bake oclussion for complex scene (crash). Beast light mapping the same problems. Small projects are working well (so this is reason why community have so much fanboys), but huge are disaster.

Unity team totally ignores bug reports regarding this (and we were not alone, everybody with large project experienced same issues). I reported out of memory crash bugs with step by step reproduction and after 1,5 year no fix. And it was nothing exotic, it was situation which any big project will encounter.

Each release Unity is less and less stable, bug fixing is slower and slower and they still adding suport of other and other platforms and keeping support of ancient HW and DX, so it is logically going worse and worse. Recently they moved rendering to separate thread (finally!), engine is indeed faster, but stability wen from bad to abyssmal. Objects in play mode started to disappear...So we were fed up of this and Unity bye bye.

 

From the feature point of view lack of streaming (asset bundles are joke, custom solution lags, becase of some bottlenecks in terrain engine and instancing architecture), no 64bit editor and the most obsolete terrain engine of all engines (they not even support bumped shaders and it must be done by various not much reliable hacks - it seems it works well, but usually it is not usable in more complex scene, because of some technological limits).

Documentation is also VERY bad, on the first sight it looks great, but once you are going deeper, nothing is described. And they have whole team dedicated to this. There is no technical documentation too. Btw, we were very surprised by quality of Unigine documentation and attutide of documentation team, by far the best we encountered so far.

 

But to not only throw rocks on Unity, Unity has by far the most effecient GUI and fastest asset import pipeline of all engines.

[ulf.schroeter]

Excellent description ! I really hope that UNIGINE crew will read this and will come to the same conclusion:

 

1) full-fledged, flawless large (and I mean really large) world streaming capability is one of the most important features for true product differentiation from other engines.

 

2) multi-multi-platform support including lowest-end is a very bad thing with regard to innovation, productivity and engine stability there are some more aspects, but I will not start discussing them again :-)

[steve.brodie]

Excellent description ! I really hope that UNIGINE crew will read this and will come to the same conclusion:

 

2) multi-multi-platform support including lowest-end is a very bad thing with regard to innovation, productivity and engine stability there are some more aspects, but I will not start discussing them again :-)

 

Yes I second this, and im sure a lot of the community agree, that trying to support too many platforms is slowing Unigine development down. I think Unigine needs to drop some of the platforms that users are not working with, and focus on the ones users want.

 

We have found no problem with creation of materials, directly on export from max. Im not sure what problem you are talking about. Using the node exporter, materials can be automatically created on export.

 

It is very interesting reading your opinions on Unity3d as we have been considering it for small interactive jobs.

[demostenes]

 

It is very interesting reading your opinions on Unity3d as we have been considering it for small interactive jobs.

 

I think for rapid prototyping and small casual games Unity is OK. Even major game studios are using Unity as prototyping tool. But never for something bigger (same experience as we did). Unity is not mature yet for big projects and it is question, if ever will be. Focus of Unity team is obvious, 70% of their income is not from companies, but from PRO versions bought by indies who are doing mainly simple casual games (PRO version means zero support, you can only report on forum/bug report system with not public bug evidence and pray).

[manguste]

Btw, we were very surprised by quality of Unigine documentation and attutide of documentation team, by far the best we encountered so far.

Thank you for such words! Here in Unigine we are really, really doing our best with all available resources.

[binstream]

We are considering dropping support of some platforms that aren't used by customers (PlayStation 3 for now), but it is to be decided during discussion on next year roadmap.