Exporting to fbx with materials into Unreal 3D

[kjenson2015]

Hello,

I am still new to this but I have some experience with modeling and I just wanted to see what my model would look like in Unreal 3D with the applied materials I gave it in Fusion 360 would look like.

So far here is what I've done.

Created model > Applied Materials > Exported to FBX > Imported to Unreal 3D.

The model successfully imports and it lists the materials but they are either flat colors or default colors instead of the choosen materials I applied within Fusion 360. I don't have an intermediary program like Maya or Zbrush. So my question is, how can I import my model into Unreal 3D exactly how I see it from Fusion 360, or is that not possible?

Thanks.

[PhilProcarioJr]

@kjenson2015

It is possible but it is not as simple as exporting a fbx loading it up in Unreal and your done.

Your up against 2 problems here.

One your model will not have proper UV maps on export so you will need to open the fbx files in something like Blender and UV map them.

The real problem with this step is you will have a densely triangulated mesh which is a pain to UV map, plus you will have seams that will be visible when you apply your texture maps. 

Then your going to need the image files you used in Fusion so you can create proper materials and apply those in Unreal. 

You will find that currently this process is quite a bit of work without some other highend 3d apps.

Epic is designing a plugin called Datasmith to help with this but it doesn't support Fusion files ATM and is still in Beta.

[kjenson2015]

@PhilProcarioJr

Thanks Phil,

Yes I attempted to load it into blender but because of the triangles it would be very time consuming to try and unwrap the mesh by hand without the ability to loop select. I'm still very new to UV unwrapping so I am in need of practice which is why I am working on smaller objects. Anyway, I also just got substance painter and I'm not sure if that program is capable of unwrapping a mesh and making its own UVs from a Fusion 360 object?

[PhilProcarioJr]

@kjenson2015

Technically speaking there is a trick if you have Substance designer, but the work flow is very tricky and not all that easy to setup. I would advise against it, but on a positive note you don't need to spend a lot of time on UV mapping when using SP.

Just use the auto UV mapping tools in Blender. They should be good enough for what you want because Substance Painter does the hard parts for you since you can paint right on the surface of the model. The only down side is if a seam becomes visible but to be honest your going to have to deal with that even if you lay out the UV maps by hand....