Now that you are messing with the importer could be a good moment to add support for lines to be imported from CAD software.
It’s the only object I really miss to be imported from Microstation.
I normally do Microstation–>3DMAX (great support for lines)—>Unity.
3D max has a pretty decent *.dwg importer (DGN import not available due to owning Acad…). It has a quite decent portfolio of tools to work with lines but does not totally eliminate the need of lines withing unity 3ditor.
I lose line information in the *.fbx export to unity so I’ve to always use the line data in 3D max and convert it to a mesh in there.
Most of the time CAD users will use lines in a 3D to represent linear elements such barriers, lane separator etc… —> Rail objects. Being able to import such info into Unity could be a blast since in editor railed elements could be created. There are powerful tools in 3dmax such Rail Clone but that workflow is less flexible.
When I talk about lines aI mean point to point straight lines, not splines.
Splines could also be considered.
Here an intense use/conversion of lines from Microstation to Unity.
In this particular case many were used for road markings. These were effectively converted to meshes in 3dmax with backface culled. This is a different use of lines in a 3D opposed to railed elements.
Or even better - introduce a new ‘Spline’ object type that could then be used to drive other things in the future - line rendering, sweeping/lofting, path constrained animation etc.
I am involved currently in archviz for one of the founders of one of the top CAD apps. Bringing in lines from a blueprint floorplan for example and giving the draughtsman or architect tools to extrude the walls and cut openings as per the blueprint would be an excellent place to start formulating a virtual architectural designer. I already have all the CAD metadata tagging worked out so i can even reverse tag their in-Unity creation and send it back out to Revit or ArchiCAD etc… Runtime FBX import would be handy and useful for game makers or industry previz, viz and design pros. The ones on the Asset Store are wonky and do not “just work”. And Unity…give us some splines already. These are so essential to hunderds of tricks and standard ops, deformers, paths, things like actual circular buttons or convoluted interlocking puzzle piece UI with no rect overlaps killing raycasts at a target because an invisible corner of an overlying control was hit. Give us all the kinds of splines. Straight, B-Splines, Bezier, Hermite, Catmull-Rom
It’s pretty clear it won’t be spline based although would need some way to evaluate the points at a granularity of some sort. The question is so varied that there is no right answer for any game engine. There isn’t any spline component object renderer type yet… so that would have to be solved first but then there’s if it should be 3d mesh based or quad based or what.
The problem is identical to exporting lines and splines from one 3D package and importing them into another 3D package. Sometimes the data is not going to be represented how you want (or at all).
In my case I need it as mesh tube close up and line renderer far away with minimum width to prevent pixel crawl. I also want to get a nearest point on line at any point and evaluate a position along the line in Units or time that’s consistent too… phew a mouthful
As a stop gap I’d probably say that Unity’s line renderer should be at least used for now as it’s the only real sane thing for now. With some sort of FBX importer option for how many points used in splines.
I’m sort of interested in this topic but can’t help feeling that I shouldnt talk about it here because it doesnt quite adhere to the rules for the 2017.1 beta forum. It’s nothing thats actually coming in 2017.1 is it?
I see what you mean. I’m not convinced they had in mind requests for importing stuff that would exist in a brand new way inside unity, or perhaps even anything that isnt already mentioned as being part of the 2017.1 importer improvements, but I stand ready to be corrected.
Dude, they have point by point feature preview of 2017x and they ask to open a new thread with the related topic to discuss.
I’ll try to answer to the "what would do do with lines " as soon as I can as I’m pretty busy and this is a topic in the need of providing adequate detail and context.
Currently lights and cameras are very welcome but it looks like one of the most requested features (from doing a search) is actually pulling out line / spline data if it’s available. It becomes a pain to have to do half the work in modelling package and half the work in Unity.
Regarding existing bits:
All lights and cameras will also be utterly wrong in Unity. There’s no way to get this data working right unless unity’s lights adopt a standard like lumins and ies light profiles. Also, the camera fov is going to be perceptually incorrect.
I guess, like the auto material generation on import, this is really just meant to be a quick arch vis thing that developers should just build on / modify during import or quickly set up scenes, it’s never going to be perfect.
I noticed a ColorTemperature setting that could be used if enabled in cginc IIRC. This should be a bell and whistle under the Light component. Turn it on and the cginc is automatically included. I wonder if that with some custom cookies might cover some of the cases as I remember that C4D used cookies or masks to give the bright spot and spread profiles of IES lights.
Macbook pro was in the shop so I ended up using XSI on an old PC. Probably a very long shot since it’s been discontinued in 2015 but the modeling on this is so good that a native importer would be :):)
I won’t lie, having proper IES lighting profile support would be pretty amazing and bring the capability in line with Unreal (further increasing the attractiveness of Unity in non-gaming applications).
