Hello, recently I’ve been trying to figure out a way to import a FBX mesh in runtime. My research led me to this topic:
The last post is mine, basically Matt said that we could move the FBX Importer from the UnrealEd module to its own plugin. My question is:
Is this process actually allowed? Doesn’t it violate the EULA? Specifically the part where it says that the Product may not contain any code from the Editor source folder.
You are right, the suggested approach violates the EULA. You cannot move that code into a Runtime module.
FBX import (and all raw data import for that matter) is an Editor concept. We do not have any plans to turn these into runtime concepts. For FBX in particular, the process is actually quite complex. It is not just the code that parses the .fbx files, but there is also code that creates the static meshes and populates them with the geometry data. You end up with static mesh assets that will then go through the cooker as part of packaging your project in order to generate the actual data files that are used at runtime. All this code is located in the Editor.
I think that being able to generate static and skeletal meshes at runtime is a viable use case, but going through the FBX import pipeline is probably not the best approach. The only use case I could see for importing actual FBX files at runtime is some kind of in-game editor that allows for importing geometry. Like I said, this is not a use case we are planning to support right now or in the near future.
If you absolutely have to have FBX import capabilities at runtime, you will have no choice but to implement your own FBX importer, sorry
Has anyone attempted to build their own runtime importer? Would it be legal if I did so? I’d like to allow users to examine their own 3D models. Finally, would you have any pointers to get me started? Thanks