Digital Screen Content not showing up in Unreal

jonbap

Hi, I don't know if this has been talked about in another post, I searched five pages and didn't see it so I'll start a new thread here.  I have recently been dabling in Unreal, and used the Daz to Unreal bridge to move the Starship Bridge by Stonemason over into Unreal.  It successfully moved across, albiet with all the digital screens blank and none of the emissives.  I learned how to create emissives in Unreal and manually fixed all the various lights, but I'm not sure what to do about the screens.  I am only moderately knowledgeable when it comes to Daz Studio which probably doesn't help, but I know when I use the model in Daz the screens are all automatically lit up with a variety of generic looking control screens.  Are they there in Unreal, hidden in some way that I simply need to activate, or do they not come across in the bridge.  If anyone more knowledgeable than I knows what is happening and how to fix it, I would very much appreciate the help.

Thanks in advance!

JonBap

metaside

Hi, I think the problem is that emissive mats are not integrated correctly into the DazToUnreal materials. What you have to do is create a new material or change the DazTounreal material to include emissive mats, check the name of the emissive texture of the screens (in Daz) and plug these into the texture sample of the emissive material in Unreal. Gonna post a screen in a sec!

metaside

Here are two screenshots: the original base material (left) and the new emissive material (right) for the emissive screens and how a console looks with it applied.

Edit: Apparently image upload is not working at the moment... Let me know if you can figure it out without the screenshots or need more help...

jonbap

Hi Metaside, thanks for responding and trying to help me out.  Unfortunately I think I need screenshots if possible, I'm moderately competent in Daz and very new to Unreal.  I'm figuring out the lay of the land in Unreal a little bit and watching tutorials, but I still don't have a good handle on Unreal and as soon as something deviates from the step by step tutorials I've watched I quickly get lost and overwhelmed by the myriad of options and windows.  I'm trying to spend time simply messing around in Unreal to get a feel for it and figure stuff out, but so far am finding it mostly a frustrating experience.

I know I just have to be patient, it's a super complex piece of software and I'm sure it makes perfect sense when you know exactly how it works, but it's tough not being able to do even simple things.

metaside

Sure, glad I still have those pics hehe... I uploaded them to another site since the upload here is still not working for me...

https://ibb.co/PTYPZnS

DazToUnreal base material on the left, a simple emissive material on the right. The node "texture sample" is where you put in your emissive texture. So just change your material on the screen and use or build one that looks like the one on the right side with texture sample connected to emissive...

Here is how it looks with that material:

https://ibb.co/1smTn94

 

And yeah, it can really take some time to get even halfway competent in a game engine. These really are huge environments. And even when things go wrong, it is not always your fault and when something crazy happens, it doesn't hurt to just restart your PC and open UE again and if it still not works, check if there are some common bugs of a similar nature... There are a lot of things that can go wrong in UE, and there are a lot of things were the documentation is obsolete or hardly existent...

But it still is absolutely worth the effort to learn it. I think tutorials are the best way, even though not all are great and you probably will encounter some stuff that is outdated or doesn't work so well in your project for some reason or is just plain wrong... Just keep at it and invest time regularly and you will make progress. And you can transfer a lot of your knowledge to completely different areas, inside Unreal and also to other things like programming languages (if you get into Blueprints) or modular synths (if you get into Metasounds) and so on... It's a long journey, but imho it's absolutely worth it.