EPIC Unreal Development Kit - now free for non-commercial us

kwistenbiebel

It says you cannot use it for anything that will generate you money so I guess it's not possible to use for archviz. Fun to play with none the less...
Unity is free and you can use it commercially. Thats the best path for archviz at the moment.

The downside to Unity is that it is the lesser god compared to Cryengine 3 and the ChromEd engine which seem to have global illumination.
Unity requires a light pre-baked model, for instance with LightUp, in order to get a decent result.

And yes, free for non-commercial means not usable to go to a client with..unfortunately.

kwistenbiebel

That Fry thing is still in development and no info is spilled.
And it is supposed to be a different concept. You still need to through a render process while the game engines are truely real-time.

Ecuadorian

I'm waiting for someone to be the guinea pig with any of these game engine options.

Kwisten, I understand Fry Render has something not too different. Have you tried it?

pichuneke

I have managed to export part of a model (there is a limit of 65000 faces), without textures, using a .obj exporter written in ruby. The problem is that if you export the model with textures (using collada .dae, for example), every component created is related to different textures and exported separately, and it can be a real nightmare to join 160 pieces manually. I don't know if there is an alternative way to export everything with textures as a single piece.

I have to learn how to include collisions, is not "authomatic". It's generated separately.

pichuneke

Some mistakes appear when trying to export the model with the plugin from http://hardpcmtechnologies.blogspot.com/2009/06/hskp2unr-version-093-aset3dpsk.html

exporting bugs.jpg

I have tried a different exporter, and the results are even worse...

exporting bugs2.jpg

I have tried exporting it with Collada, but UDK reads a lot of files, not a single one (the two columns). If I export it as an .obj to blender, and then from blender I export it to Collada (using Blender as a bridge) results are the same as using the .ase exporters.

Gaieus, if you read me: It's the model of L.VII.C of the roman forum

Gaieus

Yes, I read you. I didn't know Roans developed electricity networks in bities (and used former columns as posts)?

Keep up, Pichuneke as soon I will be interested in this stuff myself, too, and I'd like to learn from somebody!

pichuneke

@gaieus said:

Yes, I read you. I didn't know Roans developed electricity networks in bities (and used former columns as posts)?

Keep up, Pichuneke as soon I will be interested in this stuff myself, too, and I'd like to learn from somebody!

But I am asking for help! I don't know how to fix those errors when exporting to .ase or .dae format...

Anyway it will be very fun to kill aliens with my blaster inside your roman basilica!

pichuneke

I believe this is the right place to discuss, as it is the generic thread.

I tried to triangulate the model before exporting, with TIG's plugins (both triangulate faces and triangulate quad faces) and the problem persists. So I think that is a problem of the .ASE exporter.

UDK imports both .ASE and .dae, but if I try to use .dae 160 different files are imported and... well. No solution for the problem at this moment

Aerilius

Maybe they knew already baghdad battery?

I'm also interested in that. After I spend much much time for rendering an animation (I tantalized my notebook only with photon mapping LOWest quality), I think a realtime game engine could achieve equal results in less time. I think I will use rendering only for still images, because only big companies like Pixar can afford to use 6-90 hours per animation frame.

pichuneke

I finally solved the problem.

I used the original SU2ASE exporter. You can download it here:

http://www.russelllowe.com/publications/caadria2009/caadria2009.htm (Click on SKETCHUP EXPORTER RUBY SCRIPTS , I don't like to put the direct link).

You will download a zip containing different exporters. One of them is called SU2ASE. There is another called SU2ASEUT (for unreal engine, in theory it would be the right one) that produces glitches, too...

Unfortunatelly I had to manually set the scale to 40x. And the texture... that's another problem. The texture is applied to all the component or model, not the different parts of it, (as it happens when the other exporter works). And the texture is applied with a escale 2x bigger...

I hope I can manually fix this

This is the result:

If someone can tell me how to manually "paint" the models... the alternative solution would be to fix SU2ASE to prevent erasing the information of the different place for textures, as Hard PCM's Exporter does (I believe that you can't understand me, due to the way Unreal Development Kit works and my english). But I don't know ruby programming

Edit: NO! I have detected glithes with this exporter too, with some missed faces... see here:

Aerilius

Maybe this is worth a try:
3D Object Converter
skp -> obj -> ase

It supports over 500 file formats (mostly games), but unfortunately not Sketchup or Collada.

pichuneke

@aerilius said:

Maybe this is worth a try:
3D Object Converter
skp -> obj -> ase

It supports over 500 file formats (mostly games), but unfortunately not Sketchup or Collada.

I have to pay to export to that format, Aerilius...

Anyway I have tried with one of the basilicas and...

I am going to wait. Perhaps in a future someone can find a solution for that. Or if I buy Crysis and I play with the PlayUp plugin...

KXI System

Cool! but way over my level.

CameronB

I'm going to give all this a try---as I'm very interested in using the UDK to test urban design (and then run games occuring in these designed / augmented spaces).
Signed up on the Unreal community discussion board...and found this same topic discussed here:
http://www.katsbits.com/htm/tutorials/sketchup_converting_import_kmz_blender.htm

Ideally, I'd like to work out a good pipeline for using SU created content....at least to put down an initial layer of general buildings, streets, etc.
Having said that...I'm not married to using SU to create content. But, like Revit and Microstation, I know SU well and am just hoping ot reduce the amount of new programs that I would need to learn (or direct others in using them).