Unreal High Quality Rendering Project

This is the reference image that would be used in this project. It was done by Antifan Real from Deviantart.

The objective is to create a high quality render that is comparable to Mental Ray and other high end renderers using the Unreal Engine as the renderer. The scene would be modeled, textured and lit in Maya. Then the scene would be exported to the Unreal Engine for rendering. One of the features that would be worked on to facilitate the exporting of the scene is a custom exporter. The main function of this exporter is to exporter the scene intact, seamlessly carrying across to the Unreal Engine models, textures, lights and cameras. Once that is successful the next step would be animation of models, lights and cameras. The file format of choice would be .t3d.

• The first step in the creation of the exporter would be to export the camera. This would include camera translation and rotation in relation to world space. Some additional features would include the camera lens attributes so that the camera view is as identical as possible as it is in Maya.


• Next would be exporting lights. This would include translation, rotation, type and all the other attributes that are directly translatable to the Unreal Engine such as shadows, light intensity, penumbra, fall off etc.
  
• The next feature would be the model export, which includes translation, rotation, UVs and normals.
  
• The final feature of the plug-in would be the most complex that being material and shader networks.

A successful plug-in would make the transition between to the two programs as seamless as possible allowing for most of the work to be done in Maya and little to no configuration of the scene when exported to the Unreal Editor.

Current plug-in reference is from http://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/RobTheBloke/www/research/maya/exp_plugin.htm

.t3d reference would be from exporting scenes from Unreal Ed to .t3d and examining the ASCII file. In order to verify the integritity of the .t3d during these .t3d extractions from Unreal Ed, the same export would be imported back into the Unreal Ed to verify the integritity .t3d importing.