Now export your Unreal brushes, lights, cameras, movers, and more to other programs! This is a fairly well-featured Unreal to X3D/VRML converter. Create your brush or map, make sure it's all intersected nice and neat. Export your brush or map to t3d format. Load into this program, save as VRML2 format. Simultaneously saves as X3D (VRML3). Does TEXTURES! Export all the textures your brush uses as .BMP files. Use ucc.exe in the system folder, for example: UCC.EXE BATCHEXPORT Ancient.utx TEXTURE BMP C:\Unreal\Textures\Ancient Do similar for sounds, for example: UCC.EXE BATCHEXPORT AmbCity.uax SOUND WAV C:\Unreal\Textures\Ancient Then use Crossroads or Deep Exploration to convert to many other formats. Currently exports Omni and Spot lights, player starts as cameras, skyboxes as 'inline'. Sounds, DynamicAmbientSounds, Triggered lights and sounds! Movers: have them translating and rotating. Can be triggered or 'bumped'. You can opt to have a translucent box indicating triggers to make them easy to find. Bump movers carry them around!
To do skyboxes, you'd export one t3d representing the 'main map' and a seperate one containing just the skybox stuff (including the skyzoneinfo, who's tag is the name (minus .wrl) of the 'main map'. Use about 50 times greater scale factor for the skybox conversion (test to see if the skybox intersects the resulting map). VisibleTeleporters need this texture and this VRML file and this X3D file as these are treated as 'static meshes' (hint of things to come). If you have InterpolationPoints, it will create a fly-thru. Assumes one such fly-thru (currently) and defaults the viewer to going flying at startup.Fog:
UEd lets you put fog in different zones. X3D has but one zone. So, you should put your fog into the LevelInfo. If fog is not found there, the converter will look through other ZoneInfo's for fog, and will use the first one it finds.
Texures:
UCC that comes wth UEd3 does NOT export PCX or BMP, but DDS!
Not to spec, but Bitmanagement does suppot them. UnrealToX3D will work with them, but they don't display in the window while processing. There's also DXTBmp (and Deep Exploration). You can get DXTBmp HERE Then you can convert from BMP to JPG. But some don't export at all, and you may need to do screen-shots of the Texture Browser and clip them down yourself.What I do is run a exporttex.bat file that contains:
ucc batchexport %1.utx TEXTURE DDS d:\data\pics\textures\EpicGames\%1
So in practice, for example:
exporttex HumanoidArchitecture
will put a bunch of DDS files in my d:\data\pics\textures\EpicGames folder under a folder called HumanoidArchitecture.
Some examples of them:
Walls.wal14HA.dds
Grates.grt02HA.dds
Floors.flr08HA.dds
Then I batch convert them to JPEG with Deep ExplorationMeshes:
In UEd 3, you can convert meshes to brushes. You can then export the brush. Here's what you need to know:
1. You need to remove translation,scale,rotation from the mesh before converting to brush, as the conversion converts 'in-place'. So, select the mesh, double-click to open properties, find the DrawScale (in Display) and set to 1 (same for x,y,z in DrawScale3D), and find Location and Rotation (in Movement) and set them all to 0. Then convert to brush (right-click on the brush, find Convert/ToBrush). Then Brush/Export.
2. UEd 3 has BUGS like a termite mound. IF it doesn't crash putting out the brush, the texture, origin, and normals it puts out might be very wacky, or even NAN (not a number)! I detect this, warn you, and set the value to 1 (or -1 depending on the sign, if available). So, your texture maps may be messed up, but IT'S NOT MY FAULT!! The good news is, there's plenty of other editors out there you can import VRML into to fix them.
3. When you convert them with UnrealToX3D, check the 'Is Mesh' box on the Geometry tab. This sets the scale to 1 (because the 'inline' gets scaled to whatever), and the 'mode' to Examine (because it's generally easier to Examine than anything else with meshes).
ANOTHER option is to get UTPT and export the mesh from there. It does not tell you what textures you need like UnrealToX3D though. It exports to 3DS. The good news is, a lot of editors work with 3DS. I use Deep Exploration to assign the textures (the UV's are already there, phew!) and export as VRML2.
4. When instancing Meshes, UnrealToX3D is not yet smart enough to dig into sub-folders, nor grab the textures associated with meshes. I'm working on it. In the mean time, you can copy them manually. Well, if you sort your meshes into folders, where the package name is the folder, and the rest of the mesh name is the file name, then it will find the x3d and wrl files.
Terrain:
In UEd 3, you can use 'elevation maps' to define terrain. Like a bump map, gray-scale bitmaps can say 'white is high' and 'black is low'. And layers of textures can be painted on top of that to make nice land. The converter now supports single-layer elevation maps (multi coming later). NOTE: You can export the height map as a 16-bit gray BMP file. The latest version of Thumbs Plus can display them, BTW. You can just do a screen grab and snip it out to make a standard 8-bit bitmap, or the exported 16-bit one (looks better). X3D output not in there yet, WRL is ok.
Here is a starter. It's a Windows executable, written in Visual Basic. Converts 3DMF (ASCII) to T3d (Ascii Unreal Brush). You can use Design Workshop Lite to convert 3DMF (Binary) to 3DMF Ascii. And use Crossroads to convert many other formats. Note that this is NOT a full-featured converter! It only converts the geometry and pixelmaps, and only 'polyhedron', 'mesh', and 'trimesh' objects, which are the most important ones I think. See the Stonehenge map on this site for an example of how it works. Currently imports entire file as one brush, or one or more objects into a map (your choice), but would not be too hard to adapt to outputting seperate files for each object. I think what I'll do long-term is just go to and from 'raw' format, and you can use Crossroads to mill it out from there. In the mean time, if you have problems with this program, send me the model file and I'll see what I can do. Scale defaults to 20, as it seems to be a common fudge factor to get things looking about right in Unreal.
Get It Here: 3dmfToUnreal You also need this template file: StartMapFile.txt Put it in the same folder as the executable.
Now export your Unreal brushes to other programs! This is a very simplistic Unreal to OBJ converter. Create your brush, make sure it's all intersected nice and neat (subtractive brushes are NOT exported!) Use Transform/Transform Permanently (because this program ignores transforms). Export your brush or map to t3d format. Load into this program, save as .obj format. Does TEXTURES! Export all the textures your brush uses as .BMP files. Use ucc.exe in the system folder, for example: UCC.EXE BATCHEXPORT Ancient.utx TEXTURE BMP C:\Unreal-Office\Textures\Ancient Then use Crossroads or Deep Exploration to convert to many other formats. VRML and W3D work nicely. If you have problems with Crossroads output, try VRML, then import to program of your choice. Check the 'Ignore No Tex' box to have it NOT convert polygons that have no texture, and 'Ignore No Def Tex' box to ignore polygons that have the 'DefaultTexture'. This lets you surround a whole map with a brush, intersect, and export (putting the Engine/DefaultTexture on the slack surfaces). Use the 'Do Builder Brush' box to just do that intersected brush. Et Viola!
Get Just LATEST the .EXE (96k) Here: UnrealToObj.exe
Get the installer here (includes OCX and DLL's) UnrealToObj.zip (May be older than EXE above)
Heck, get both. Install the installer, then copy the EXE over the one it installed, just be be sure.
This will NOT be a viewer, because I don't want to deal with OpenGL, DirectX, etc and multiple platforms' displays. This WILL be freely distributable source code.
This will contain some virtual base classes which describe hierarchical geometries and attributes, which most file formats already support. It will be a union of all the stuff I can find. Each conversion module must know how to parse and build that format into and out of this object hierarchy. Not really complicated at all.
I am sick to death of the notion that this file can only display on a Mac, or I must buy some expensive software
to do this, or that this great model is in some format nobody ever heard of. Well, this will attempt to remedy
this.
UPDATES!
So there's some good stuff out there. Right Hemisphere's 3d Explorer will support Unreal II models, and is an all-around cool application. I may be writing an Unreal module for it soon.
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