3dmax Growfx to Unreal Engine

[mouseboycheese]

I'm currently looking into creating growfx foliage (specifically shrubs and trees) and importing them into unreal.

I've got a decent looking looped animation of a tree going in growfx (around 200f looped with around 1mill polys). Is there a way to get the looped animation into unreal engine? I'm guessing 1mill polys is way too high to be scattering around in unreal and a 200f loop is probably also too high, but I've been fiddling around with it for a while now and don't seem to be getting anywhere. 

 

Any help here would be massively appreciated!

Cheers, 
Chris

[harryb]

I too am interested in this topic. A while back Eoin O'Broin created some fantastic GrowFX assets and brought them into Unreal Engine, created textures from Quixel Megascans and managed to have convincing UE4 wind driving the leaves and branches. You can find his excellent work here:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/V1weP

 

and here in this forum:

 

 

Perhaps we could persuade Eduard and/or Eoin to create a tutorial showing exactly how to do this. For me, the ONLY thing keeping me from leveraging my GroFX assets in Unreal is not understanding how to export from 3DS Max and set these up for wind in UE4. 

 

If people understood how to do this, GrowFX could become a serious competitor to SpeedTree for UE4.

 

 

 

[Eduard]

Hi,

 

Of course, we'll try to implement the converter to UE4, but now we still working on version 2.0, and this will be possible only after the release of this version.

Thanks!

[harryb]

Thanks Eduard! :-)

[Calwyne]

As I understand it, enobroin was able to pivot paint only the simpler assets using Pivot Painter due to the inability of GrowFX to maintain the parent/child hierarchy (and Pivots - but that is solved in part by Pivot Painter 2.0 which is able to automatically reposition pivots for you). He then used vertex painting to drive animation in UE4 using the unreal wind system. If possible - it would be ideal to pivot paint all assets without relying on the vertex painting method. Would love to hear if anything has been updated/made simpler since then?