Turn Your Vray Scene To Real Time In Minutes With Datasmith and Unreal Engine

Do you think it will work to just translate a huge Vray interior scene directly into real time with Unreal Engine 5 (and Datasmith)? Check out the video to find out!

This is Part 1 of hopefully many videos following this project, which I'm calling Gable House. In this one, I am just trying to transfer my Vray project into Unreal Engine 5 via Datasmith. Later, I have lots of plans for this project inside of Unreal Engine, so stay tuned for that and make sure to subscribe.

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FULL DESCRIPTION
Follow along in this video as I attempt to take a professional Vray interior directly into Unreal Engine with basically no adjustments. I use Datasmith for this process, and it usually works quite well, but I'm not sure on a file this big. Once I have it in there, I am going to explore making interior scenes look really good inside of Unreal Engine. I'm hoping that making things really nice with Vray will give me a big head start. That is assuming that everything translates nicely. Check out the video to see exactly how it goes, and stay for the results at the end. Subscribe for more of this project.

[chrisharris_arizona]

I do civil engineering visualizations and have a decent workflow (in my own mind haha) for Max to UE5, with camera matching.
As you learned, naming, naming, naming is very important.
I don't know how those objects that were giving you trouble were made, but if there's a lot of stuff in the modifier stack, sometimes that will cause some issues so copying-collapsing down to an editable poly/mesh helps.

Also, if using RailClone...you'll definitely want to copy the RC object and then convert that down to an editable mesh/poly. I had an actual railing and when kept as a RC object it brings it in as a billion little pieces and that will bog it down HUGE, so collapse those down.

I tell people that while UE is faster at rendering (exponentially), its actually MORE labor hours because it'll take you a few hours to days to get all the lighting and materials to where you want it to be, project size dependent, but its worth it in the end because of the faster render times will get your project delivered quicker (in my case for large animations). Any updating you have to do, it's easy because you've already dialed all your materials in so importing the objects that need updating is quick. I guess that's another tip...I just import the object that needs the update, rather than re-exporting out the datasmith file of the whole project in the hopes that it understands and keeps everything. I think it works, but I'm not doing that for projects that are sometimes miles long.

[MrMadvillan]

It's sort of a problem when new users treat UE only as a "faster render engine" when it is in fact more of a lighting and look dev tool like Katana, Solaris or clarisse(rip). It's not like Max, , Maya or Blender where you produce assets and they only thing referencing out of software is textures and maybe some proxy files. You could in theory create this kind of workflow(all within a modeling and animation software) but it's best to think about a pipeline rather than a traditional exportout/import in. If you think about UE as a software where you're staging and set dressing, it makes more sense - you building is a hero asset, your books plants, carpet etc are all set dressing. The later of which you don't pipe through datasmith(hence the errors and the head scratching about vrayproxy and UV).

[BirdieDev]

Meandered my way to this corner of YouTube as a game developer purely out of curiosity, very cool to see how people from totally different backgrounds use Unreal.

[willembuiting]

I use the datasmith livelink with Sketchup all the time but i do the lighting and camera's within Unreal.

[WoodysAR]

So since you didn't mention it can I assume Datasmith is a standard part of Unreal? (it is not).... It might be nice to say how to get this ...

[erik]

Great stuff, literally just watching you for 10mins struggling

[BarryLester]

This is what our team has been doing over the past few days, converting our old vray scenes from max to UE5. We are using max 2022 and the datasmith exporting process is really smooth. We have some problems like it creates lots of master materials, not material instances, and scalar data like glossiness and specular maps are mistakenly labelled as sRGB. We also have some weird problems with glass materials. I have a scene where a glass material lights up the whole scene even though the emissive socket is empty. In another scene, a glass material has no translucency, even when I use the glass material that comes with the starter content, which feels like there is something wrong with the mesh.

[pakiito]

I know that there is vray for unreal engine, do you already have the plug in? If don't maybe could help with the missing textures error, thanks for the vid BTW! Even with those issues the scene looks awesome un UE5

[DingDongDrift]

i'm amazed that this worked for you as well as it did. i'm simply importing ONE LIGHT FIXTURE and the materials don't work at all. all the textures, everything is there, but all the materials don't work. a shiny satin brass is matte black, glass is just gray, matte black is white. not sure what i'm doing wrong, but i can not figure out how to fix this. maybe you have an idea.

[stephaniezeddies]

I'm using vray for rhino. i know it's not identical to max but and i've been tryin to get chaos cosmos assets into unreal with datasmith and while it's bringing over the geometry it won't bring over the textures. any suggestion why this might happen and how to fix it. it clearly worked for you.

[philipkelly]

were is falls down for me. Why would you want to have a file that its nutts.

[mae]

rule number one.. DO NOT BRING CAMERAS OR LIGHTS.. you still have to lite everything inside unreal.

[mae]

Why would you want to export everything at once.. NO GOOD... that is why you create a datasmith for every objects.. for example.. all DOORS datasmith. All Windows. ALL WALLS. . ceiling and floor should go separetly incase you want to change or move your ceilling or flooring. all separate. never export everything at once. thats suicide...