Unreal Tournament Textured Architecture brush notes

UT Textured Brushes for Level Editing

PLEASE NOTE: this document is obsolete. Please consult the Unreal Developer Network site for the latest documentation including detailed tutorials and plugins.

Overview

The .T3D format provides a means for storing textured geometry which the Unreal (Tournament) editor can load and save. Traditionally, a lot of the textured level architecture in the editor is created without the help of third-party tools, which works great for most purposes but can be laborious when very complex texture mapping and/or highly detailed geometry is required.

.T3D textured brush export from Maya

To use the .T3D exporter, install the main ActorXTool Maya exporter in the Maya plugins folder;
load a scene and select all geometry that needs to be exported - for example, using the menus: Edit->Select All by Type -> Polygon Geometry.
Invoke the .T3D exporter panel with the 'axbrush' command - this can be typed on the maya command line, or bound to a custom button.
Browse for an output folder, then type the desired brush file in the appropriate field.

To check whether the proper materials are being pulled from the scene with the desired names, optionally press 'get names from scene'.
These names, which are directly retrieved from the Maya materials of all the textures that are present on the geometry you selected, can be overridden with arbitrary names if required; these then serve as the names to refer to textures which, if imported and present in the Unreal editor at brush-import time, will ensure accurate identical texture placement. Note that the textures for each particular material used on the architecture in Maya needs to match the dimensions of its equivalent in the Unreal editor (typically, these are imported and saved in a .UTX texture file in advance) for this to succeed.

Press the export button to write the .T3D file. In the Unreal editor, import this file as a brush. If the material names that the brush got exported with match the names of existing textures of the same dimensions, which are present in the editor, it will be texture-mapped correctly. Now, this brush - which shows up as a wireframe brush template - can be applied in all the usual ways to create architecture in a level.