Preflight - Overview

As the name suggests, Preflight is a checklist of SiNi tools and functions to run through before exporting your 3D assets to a third party game engine.

It began as an idea during a meeting with the team from Unreal Engine. It was suggested that it would be cool if there was a better way to fix modelling issues 'at source' prior to exporting, thereby attempting to reduce the likelihood of discovering issues once imported.

This in practice means that 3D artists workflow is one-directional out of 3ds Max, with Preflight utilising the functions from other IgNite collection plugins, automated to a few clicks.

As a checklist, it automates the prep-process of preparing a 3D asset for export, or in some cases, artists use this to clean up models in their 3ds Max scenes. As it's simple to use, we recommend running through the steps to ensure the models are ok. Further to this, we plan to implement more functions to simplify export preparation and tailor to specific software requirements. For example, in the list below, Lumberyard, for example, uses sub-material numbering to assign materials.