HammUEr Quick Start Guide Hamm UEr

HammUEr%20Quick-start%20guide

User Manual: Pdf

Open the PDF directly: View PDF .
Page Count: 2

HammUEr Quick-start guide

by Joe Wintergreen (@joewintergreen)

Overview

HammUEr is a plugin for Unreal Engine 4 which allows you to import levels, textures,

materials and in some cases models from older game engines like Source and Quake 1

and 2, which had better level design tools than Unreal does. This lets you make maps in

Hammer, Trenchbroom, or your preferred BSP editing tool, and use them in your Unreal

Engine games.

This documentation might seem intimidating at first, but you'll get the hang of it all pretty

quickly.

Terms

When I use the word "Hammer" in this document, it's probably interchangeable with

whatever BSP level editor you use. Trenchbroom, Radiant, Worldcraft, whatever.

When I use the word "Materials" in this document, it refers to UE4 materials or

material instances. If I'm talking about Source engine materials (.vmt files) I'll say

VMT. If I'm talking about Quake 1/2 or Half-Life 1, or Source Engine textures (.vtf

files), I'll say "textures".

Getting Started With HammUEr

To install HammUEr, you just place the HammUEr folder in a folder called Plugins within

your Unreal project folder, for instance UnrealProjects\MyAwesomeGame\Plugins. If you

don't have a Plugins folder, just create one. When you open that project in Unreal, you

should have a HammUEr icon in your toolbar. If you don't, open Edit -> Plugins and make

sure HammUEr is enabled (it's under the NT Entertainment category).

Click the HammUEr button on the toolbar to bring up HammUEr.

Importing Textures/VMTs

If you're importing a level from an earlier engine, first you'll need to import their textures

(and/or VMTs if it's a Source Engine level).

If you already have all the materials you need in Unreal, skip this step.

If you don't need your level to be textured, you can skip this step.

If you're not working from Source Engine map files, ignore anything about

VMTs.

Select the tab of HammUEr labelled "TextUEr". This is the part of HammUEr that deals

with textures and materials. Right now we're only interested in the "Import" section.

Click the "Choose source directory" button and browse to the folder where your textures or

VMTs are kept. Textures can be image files or bundled up in a .WAD file as is common for

Quake 1/2/Half-Life 1. In the "Import to" field, specify any folder name. This will be

a subdirectory in your UE4 project's Content folder.

HammUEr will import all textures and create material instances for them (each texture will

not get its own material, because that would be wasteful and unwieldy).

The material instances will be derived from the parent material you specify in the Source

Material field. This must be a material with, at minimum, a texture parameter hooked up to

BaseColor, which you will then specify in TextUEr as the Base Parameter. The material can

be as complex as you like as long as it has that. If importing from VMTs, you can also

specify texture parameter slots for the VMT-specified normal and specular maps.

Once you've specified your source material, parameters and source directory, click Import.

Once the process finished you should have a lot of textures and material instances in

subfolders under the one you specified.

Any textures/VMTs imported here will be remembered and automatically found by

HammUEr when you import your levels.

Worldcraft circa 1996

Bare minimum source material.

Material Instances for a bunch of Half-Life textures imported from halflife.wad.

Importing Props/MDLs

HammUEr also supports importing models from various Source versions via the PropUEr

tab. Choose a source directory and click "Get list of items". This will create a multi-

selectable list of all the models in the directory and subdirectories you've chosen, as

shown. You have some options to finetune and bake in rotations for selected models, but in

most cases, you will just want to click "All" and then "Import" to create Unreal versions of all

the models it has found.

Importing a level from Hammer

When you save a map from a Source Engine version of Hammer, it'll save as a .vmf file. If

you're saving from a Quake editor you'll probably get a .map, and if you're saving from a

Half-Life 1 engine it'll be an .rmf. To be able to use these, reopen the .rmf with a Source

version of HammUEr and resave them to .vmf.

HammUEr also supports Doom3 .map and .proc (compiled meshes) files, for which the

rest of this documentation will remain valid and the same.

In the HammUEr tab, click "Choose File". Browse to, and select, your map file, then click

"Open File". HammUEr will search the file for references to textures/VMTs that it

recognises (probably because you imported them earlier through TextUEr). You should see

a list of all the textures used in your map, the width and height of each, a column of

checkboxes called "ND", and a column of UE4 Material references.

Basically, for each row, the texture shown at left is going to be replaced with the UE4

Material specified in the dropdown on the right. The width and height must be correct, or

your map won't be UV'd correctly once you import it. If HammUEr hasn't automatically

found the appropriate materials to use, you can specify them here and the Width and

Height will update accordingly. HammUEr will remember the materials you specify here for

next time.

The ND column is important: it stands for NoDraw. Any texture with the ND box ticked will

be skipped on import. You usually want to enable this for skyboxes, clip brushes, and some

other things.

Once this list looks correct, and you've specified an import directory, hit "Go". All level

geometry should be converted to meshes, imported to UE4, and placed in the level you

have open.Lights will also be imported.

HammUEr imports each brush from the level as its own mesh, except for groups and brush

entities. Each group and brush entity is imported as a single mesh. It's good to keep this in

mind when building your maps. Elaborate structures like arches should always be grouped

or made into entities so you don't end up with a single arch in Unreal being made out of a

large number of meshes.

ConfigUEr

The ConfigUEr tab contains a bunch of important functions which are all fairly

self-explanatory and have detailed tooltips - hover over them to see what they do. The

most important is "Scale Conversion", which determines how large the level you import is

going to be - 100cm = x Hammer units - and the best value is going to depend on the level

you're importing and what game it was for. If it's a Half-Life level, around 37 is a good

number.

For a more in-depth explanation of all the various options and possible problems you might

run into, read the full documentation in the other file.

PropUEr model list.

HammUEr material list.

ConfigUEr