Cinema 4D to Unity workflow with ORBX geometry Tweet

[Timmey158]

Hello Community!
So Im currently working on a Project with Cinema 4D, Unity and Octane for Unity and Cinema involved:
We create our Objects and textures inside Cinema 4D and want to use them in Unity. Because there are limitations in exporting material properties from Cinema to Unity (for example things like specular, refraction and other channels cant be exported) we are now designing the materials via the Octane nodegraph editor inside Cinema 4D and this works great The export to Unity is also no problem via the ORBX File format that stores geometry, animations and the octane materials with all their properties. The only thing thant we cant figure out is how to actually see the models inside the native Unity editor. there is just a bounding box or sometimes just a position indicator but absolutely no geometry or texture. In the PBR Viewer of Octane inside Unity everything works fine but we would like to build the scenes first inside the native Unity Viewport and then do all the tuning on lighting etc in the PBR viewport later.

So in an older similar post its said that there should be a way to send the geometry to Unity via some kind of fbx node proxy export?

With the final 3.07 release we will have the ability to export ORBX geometry node to FBX Proxy mesh (if scene size is within reason) as an alternative to just showing a bounding box in the Unity viewport. The FBX based ORBX Proxy could in theory then be unwrapped by Unity Editor and live baked by Octane - we'll be testing that end to end after 3.07 core work is done and fully integrated back into Unity.

We use the latest 3.08 Version of octane so this should be possible now as the post above mentioned right? So how would the exact procedure be to actually see the objects inside unity while arranging them before switiching to octane PBR View for lighting and post?

Thanks in advance!

[Xhed]

The only thing thant we cant figure out is how to actually see the models inside the native Unity editor. there is just a bounding box or sometimes just a position indicator but absolutely no geometry or texture. In the PBR Viewer of Octane inside Unity everything works fine but we would like to build the scenes first inside the native Unity Viewport and then do all the tuning on lighting etc in the PBR viewport later.

Are you using the Load ORBX, or Import ORBX method? Load ORBX will create proxies in Unity, whereas Import ORBX will copy the geometry & materials to Unity.

[Timmey158]

Oh thanks a lot, did not try this option at all
After deciding the import and export paths, it starts by popping up a progress bar that fills up again and again but after some time starts importing it the desired way. Now everything workes and looks totally fine
Thank you for the support!

[Timmey158]

Oh no actually still not working properly, what am I doing wrong?
Import process looked fine till the end and now I got some errors and again dont see any geometry in the Unity viewport and this time also not in the PBR Viewport after starting the render process
Hope someone can help, I will test some other ORBX files now.

[Xhed]

After deciding the import and export paths, it starts by popping up a progress bar that fills up again and again but after some time starts importing it the desired way.

Since I am unable to determine a proper progress percentage, I decided to have the progress bar cycle so that you can at least see that the program hasn't frozen.

Oh no actually still not working properly, what am I doing wrong? (...)

We fixed that issue last week, there will be a new build out soon. I didn't want to release it just before the weekend, as I would then be out of the office and unable to provide support

[Timmey158]

Thanks im advance for the problem solving, Im looking forward to the new release. I tried the whole toolchain with a smaller model and it works fine for that, but there is another problem I ran into. We assign object layer colors for further use in unity to visualize the different object layers with their corresponding colors. The thing is, these object layer colors show up absolutely fine in the ORBX that is imported wt the "Load" option (the one that is not visible in the unity editor) but the sam ORBX imported via the "Import" option does not show the object layer color when rendered It seems to loose the object layeer colors during importing, is there a way to avoid this? It shows up in the PBR View but is completely black.
Thanks again for the support!

[Xhed]

Object layer colors will indeed be lost when importing an ORBX file, as the Object layer map nodes aren't parsed on import.

[Timmey158]

Is there a way to force it to parse the object layer map?

[azen]

Oh no actually still not working properly, what am I doing wrong?
Import process looked fine till the end and now I got some errors and again dont see any geometry in the Unity viewport and this time also not in the PBR Viewport after starting the render process
Hope someone can help, I will test some other ORBX files now.

Hi,

When you open the folder (that gets populated with materials/geometry/etc) are the contents empty? Does it have everything else except for the geometry? If you can provide the ORBX File, we can try testing on our end and determining the root of the issue for you.

Cheers,
Azen

[Timmey158]

Hello!
So last Update (Version 1.1.1.1322) fixed the import problems properly, big thanks for that now geometry imports as expected. There is still my previous question, if it is possible to also import the Object Layer Color inside the import process? We use this to mark different Layers of the Scene for post but it only shows up when you load the ORBX with the "Load" command (In this case as mentioned before, the unity editor doesnt show the object). Would be really nice to also get the object layer node parsed there.
Thanks in advance!