3ds max and UED

[DarkProject]

wondering if you can make a whole room or map in 3ds max and import it into UED 2,0 than zone it and add lights and all. also would this by chance be a good way to reduce polys , by building in 3ds max) and what are the great uses and best things i can do with the program to make my map better?

[Bloody-Reaper]

No... Making maps in 3dsmax (If yo can that is) wouldnt help improve the polycount or anything... You wont get less polygons that way.
You can use it to make meshes (I think) that you can add as actors.

[DarkProject]

i heard you can make rooms in it and importa the rooms into ued

[Bloody-Reaper]

Maybe... But a UED box still got as many polygons as a 3dsmax box.

[NeoPendragon]

Take a look at this: http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/Merge_Polygons

Go through your map and try merging all of the co-planar polygons on your brushes.

[Ulukai]

"But a UED box still got as many polygons as a 3dsmax box"

I'm afraid not.....

With UED 2, making BSP brushes in 3DSMax and importing them is generally a bad idea, unless you're making terrain. Max makes everything out of triangles. So if you made a cube, exported it to DXF and imported it into UED 2.0, You'd have a cube with 12 BSP polgons (2 triangles per side).

A cube built in UED 2.0 itself would only have 6 polygons because it allows quads. Merging the polys will only combine co-planar polys with regards to texture usage - if you subsequently view the brush in wireframe mode you'll see all the polys are still there regardless of whether the editor lets you select them as one surface.

Deco objects are best built in max for UED 2 - but you'll need to know some uscript in order to import them (I'm not going to go into it here)

Make sure you don't get tutorials for UED3.0 confused with UED2.0 (which Thievery uses). In UED 3, making stuff with max and importing it as a static brush is to be positively encouraged. But just to clarify: You can't import static meshes/brushes into the Thievery engine.

As a general rule, anything you make in max indented as a BSP brush for Thievery will have twice the rendering time of the equivalent brush built in UED 2.0. So don't do it

You can type "STAT FPS" into the console to see how many polys are being rendered.......keep int below 250 (and preferably 200)

[Switch`]

yes, you can, but knowledge about max, ued and bsp is recommended..

http://www.planetunreal.com/Spooger/Converter.html

http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/3D_Studio_Max_Advanced_Texturing

MAX TO UNREAL CONVERTER

http://www.3dactionplanet.com/undying/files/index.shtml

T3D MAXScript Tool and User Guide
By EALA Technical Art Director Kyle McKisic, for transferring level geometry to and from MAX.

[Switch`]

While importing objects from 3ds max keep in mind that game is not directly using brushes to render the map - brushes are used by UnrealEd to compile a list of renderable surfaces (Nodes / BSP Tree) that are then splitted or merged with other surfaces to optimize the speed of rendering.

dictionary:
Polygons: surfaces which you can select in ued
Nodes: surfaces that are used to render the map, when a part of a node is visible, entire node is rendered, when node is not visible on player's screen, it's skipped in the rendering process

> Take a look at this: http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/Merge_Polygons
> Go through your map and try merging all of the co-planar polygons on your brushes.
Use that to speed up your maps by splitting/merging coplanar surfaces, however keep in mind that this is a double-edged sword:
- you can optimize or slowdown your fps
- you can fix or make bsp holes with it
- and the compiler/rebuilder always has the last word on how the surfaces are splitted/merged

Examples:


Scene 1:
- Textured view - 256x256x256 substracted cube with 64x64x64 cube added on the bottom
- 6 polygons/surfaces and 9 nodes are visible


Scene 1:
- BSP view - different color is used for each node
- 6 polygons and 9 nodes
- the poly on bottom of the big cube was split into 4 nodes to speed up the rendering


Scene 2:
- BSP view - 256x256x256 substracted and tesselated (like an object imported from 3dsmax) cube with 64x64x64 cube added on the bottom
- 9 polygons and 11 nodes
- by default surfaces on tesselated (created from triangles) brushes are not merged, they create separate polygons


Scene 2:
- BSP view - the same scene as above, I used Polygons->Merge on the big brush and rebuilded
- 6 polygons and 9 nodes
- notice that coplanar polygons/surfaces on big brush are now merged
- the brush geometry is still the same - it is created from triangles, but it will be rendered just like a normal non-tesselated cube

[Nachimir]

I always was a bit unsure about nodes, but not now. Very useful, thank you Switch.