Unreal Cooked Assets Importer for Autodesk Maya

This proof-of-concept plugin enables seamless import of cooked Unreal Engine assets into Autodesk Maya. Designed to streamline workflows for technical artists and pipeline developers, it reconstructs Unreal Engine data as native Maya objects, bypassing complex conversion steps.

Key Capabilities

• Direct Asset Import: Supports Unreal Engine 4.25-5.6 cooked assets, including .pak, .ucas, and .utoc formats.
• Full Geometry Fidelity: Reconstructs clean meshes with normals, vertex colors, and multiple UV sets (including lightmaps).
• Skeletons and Skinning: Preserves joint hierarchies, weights, sockets, and bone transforms as in Unreal Engine.
• Materials and Textures: Extracts embedded textures to PNG and connects them to native Maya shading networks.
• Morph Targets: Imports as Maya blendShapes for animation and rigging workflows.
• Oodle Compression Support: Automatically configures the Oodle decompression library, critical for modern Unreal Engine games.

Technical Details

• Core Technology: Utilizes CUE4Parse (.NET) for parsing Unreal Engine file formats and Oodle for decompression of modern game assets.
• Architecture: A C++ plugin integrates with Maya’s API to create meshes, skeletons, and materials, with a C# wrapper for UI via .NET Hosting.
• User Interface: Qt-based dialogs provide intuitive asset browsing and import configuration.

Demo

This project is not publicly available due to the sensitive nature of cooked asset workflows. The demo below showcases its functionality using a custom test project built with free, open-source assets to ensure legal compliance.

Context

Importing cooked Unreal Engine assets into Maya is a complex challenge due to proprietary file formats, coordinate system differences, and advanced compression techniques like Oodle. This plugin demonstrates a robust solution for bridging these ecosystems, showcasing expertise in multi-language programming (C++, C#), pipeline development, and 3D data integration.

Developed as a personal project to explore Maya and Unreal Engine workflows, it highlights advanced technical artistry and tool development skills.