Setting up VRED 2024 to work with 5.3.2 Datasmith.
A short article on setting up VRED 2024 Professional to use Unreal Engine's Datasmith FBX exporter. While this article will be focusing on UE 5.3.2, when UE 5.4 is released there will be no need for any manual tweaking of the files (hopefully).
A quick rundown of context. Since VRED 2023, the underlying Python API which had been in use for years called PySide 2 was now upgraded. It's new Python API v2 is based on Qt for Python, which is a port of the original PySide.
With this new API brings challenges. The older DatasmithFBXimporter file that was shipped with Unreal Engine 5.3.2 builds and below were still containing code written for PySide2. Trying to run the scripts generated errors that it could not find PySide 2. Frustratingly, downloading a previous release of Python (We used Python 3.6) still did not work.
Error when script is ran trying to detect the PySide2 module which does not exist in VRED anymore.
Welcome in, Flavien Picon who helpfully pointed out the new Python change to unsuspecting users on the forums. He also shared an updated version of the DatasmithExporter with code now referencing PySide 6 (Qt for Python). The zip for the importer can be found here.
The eight python scripts should all be placed into the DatasmithExporter folder in your VRED scripts folder. The default location for this would be the location below however if you have a custom scripts folder you should look to see which folder VRED is scanning upon startup to find out where to place your files.
C:\Program Files\Autodesk\VREDPro-16.1\lib\plugins\WIN64\Scripts
Folder location for installed plugin
You may receive this warning upon startup.
Do not worry. For some reason, VRED is triggering a security prompt due to an unknown script. These files are completely safe and We inspected them (Which you can too if you are still unsure) multiple times before running them on a few of our production machines.
This however is not all that is needs to be changed. VRED 2024 changes the tags associated with FBX files upon export and this means that Unreal Engine (Dataprep and Datasmith modules only, normal FBX import remains unaffected) cannot detect this is an FBX coming from VRED therefore it does not show or trigger any datasmith process.
Flavien again provides two solutions.
For users running source builds, all that's needed is to grab the latest 5.4 release branch and it will contain the latest updates to the FBXimporter module.
If you are using a launcher installed build then you would have to manually overwrite one of the .dll's currently installed in your 5.3 build with an updated one from Flavien/Epic. The updated dll file can be downloaded directly from Epic Games' Box source repo.
Paste this .dll into UE_5.3\Engine\Plugins\Enterprise\DatasmithFBXImporter\Binaries\Win64
Overwriting the file means that when you open a Dataprep/Datasmith import file dialog it can now successfully see the FBX you exported from VRED.
Congratulations, you successfully upgrade Datasmith to VRED 2024. 🎉🎉
