 Hey there team, welcome back to Game Dev Academy. I'm Shane and in today's video I want to take you through how you can export 3D models from Unreal Engine and then edit them in whichever 3D package you generally use. So in my case, it'll be Maya. So without any further waffling, let's get stuck in. I had to use this method a few weeks ago for a project I was doing for this channel where I needed a really nice looking tree and I knew that the kite demo, which is provided free by Epic had some really nice trees. The problem was that these trees are so detailed, they're so heavy that any time I tried to open it on my PC it just crashed on Unreal Engine. There was nothing I could do to get the trees into my level. But I did think it would maybe let me export them. So I gave that a try. So instead of trying to open the tree or import it I just right-clicked on the tree to get the right-click menu and after about 40 minutes of thinking about it, it did let me choose to export it. So let's have a look at how that works. So here you can see I've just put together a dead basic project just to show you how this works and you can see I've already imported the kite demo assets. You can see that's just in a folder in the content browser there. So if we open that folder up and we're looking for the trees so it turns out they're not in level content. So let's go back up a level and we'll go in environments. There's the trees folder and we'll go with hilltree underscore O2 because I know that's particularly heavy one and then within this folder, let me just resize these so I can see what I'm doing. Within this folder, if I scroll down a touch, there's hilltree O2 just over there on the left and in order to get this open, this is a really heavy asset. It won't just let me open it up. I need to right-click on it and you'll see that now it thinks about it and at this stage I had to put an edit in because it thought about this for, it felt like about 40 minutes before it would give me the right-click menu. So let's just edit all that time out and have a look at that menu option. So here you can see the right menu has popped up. So I'm going to go into asset actions and just choose to export it. So let's give that a click and then all I need to do is choose a location for the file and give it a name. I'm just going to give it the same name that it's got because it'll make that re-importing easier so that I can make it into a lighter asset. So once I get to the FBX export options, I just leave everything the same. I want the collision mesh to come through. I want all the level of detailed models to come through. So I'm just going to choose to export. Now that that's exported, I can open Maya 2020 and then import the FBX and take a look at it. So here we are in Maya and all I'll do is click on file and import. I just drop this file onto the desktop. So if I navigate to my desktop and find hiltree underscore zero two dot FBX, I can import it. And you'll see that it actually imports really quickly considering how much UE4 struggles with it. Maya just kind of opened it straight away and you can see all the detail is just pretty much coming from those leaves that are pretty much individual leaves, which is quite a lot to ask for a game engine. And if we have a look at the poly count, so it's about 50,000 triangles for the highest tree, which is quite a lot for a game asset. But this was done more of a tech preview, so it's not too bad. Right, so let's open the outliner and we'll see that we've got the collision mesh that only needs to be on the trunk. That's fine. I'm going to leave that alone. And if I expand this, this is an LOD group. I can see that there are four different levels of detail and it's this LOD zero, which is the 50,000 tries one that I need to get rid of and then bring that down. So LOD one is going to become the highest resolution version of this mesh. So you see, I can now that I've taken it out of the LOD group. I'll just delete LOD zero, but I still need to have an LOD zero. So I'll rename LOD one to LOD zero and then LOD two to LOD one and finally LOD three becomes LOD two. Now I'm going to select them in the right order, go to edit LOD option near the bottom and then create LOD group and then the final thing you should always do with this is just expand the group and make sure that everything's gone in the right order. So zero, one and two should be in the right place. And then usually Maya will let you zoom in and out and it will swap between them to give you an idea. And that's working fine. Although LOD two, which is the one that's the billboards doesn't show up particularly well in this, but it is still there and it does still work. Now I've tested it. I can just export. So I'll export everything because I want to make sure I get all the LODs and the collision. I'll make sure it's an FBX as that's what OMEAL is expecting. And what I've done here is just renamed the original, the one I exported to Hilltree underscore zero to old in case I need it at any point. And then this new version, this lighter version is going to get that original name so that when I import it everything just behaves the same. So I'm just swapping it out. So now I'm done with Maya. I'm going to jump back into OMEAL Engine 4 and Let's just take a look at this tree. You can see that the original has 50,000 almost 50,000 tries. So what I will do is just delete that re-importing doesn't work particularly well or I can't get it to work. So what I do is delete the original and then re-import the new one. So because it's in some scenes, I need to just force delete it, which is not a problem. Everything should still work fine. Now that it has gone, I can choose to import the lighter version that I've created and I need to just make sure that as well as just importing the mesh. I also Import the LODs. Otherwise it won't behave as it did originally. It will be just kind of static. So we need to make sure that we also get LOD 1 and 2. I'm also choosing just to put it into an LOD group which should control when the LOD transitions happen. I probably would choose to change these manually later, but this gives a bit of a starting point. So now that it's imported, you can see that all my different LODs are there. Here's the furthest away LOD. So this is the one that didn't show in Maya, but I love how Epic have put this one together. Look how pretty it is. This is a billboard, but it still looks kind of 3D. It's magic. Anyway, you can see that that has worked. We have now imported a lighter version. The highest detail LOD is coming in at just 4,317 triangles, which is like lower than 10% of the original high res. So that means it's much lighter. It still looks pretty. It's still fine. And this is the one that I put into the project that I did previously. So hopefully you found this useful. If you are needing to export any assets from UE4, you should now be able to do that pretty easily. If you found it useful, give me a thumbs up. If you want more videos like this one, then make sure you subscribe and hit the dingaling bell so that you get instantly notified when I put a new video out. If you want to help me out, I do have a Patreon, so check that out. The link's below and all that's left is for me to thank you for watching. And hopefully I will see you in the next video.