Oh very nice! That’ll save me some time going back and forth between Ue4 and 3dsmax. Here is another idea for your tool:
Add a feature that allows you to create procedual/modular skeletal meshes, so one could add joints/bones to a skeletalmesh and bind a static mesh to those bones.
That’s one of the common workflows i still have in 3dsmax when working in ue4.
@Thunderstruck, I’ve submitted Pivot Tool to unreal marketplace, hopefully it’ll be approved soon. @Burnz, creating procedual mesh and skin binding might be out of scope of the pivot tool, but I’m actually start working on a mesh editing tool which could be used to modify static mesh inside unreal editor.
@MatzeOGH, sorry that you can only manipulate the pivot in the level editor viewports, since there’s no easy way to extend the static mesh editor without engine code modification.
Good news is that whatever pivot changes you baked into the static mesh will be reflected inside static mesh editor instantly.
@apoisonedgift, I haven’t got the chance to use the asset you mentioned, so I can only tell from the description and video, here’re some differences I noticed:
Pivot Tool doesn’t require extended version of Static Mesh Actor, it works with with any actors with valid bounding box, that means you can use Pivot Tool with not only Static Mesh Actors, but also Brush Actors, Skeletal Mesh Actors or Blueprint instances.
In Pivot Tool, you can apply 27 pre-defined pivot presets with one mouse button click, or you can move pivot point manually with Alt+Middle mouse drag on transform widget (an engine feature) + “Set” button click.
With Pivot Tool, you can bake pivot change into static meshes. That might come in handy when you got assets from artist and found out the mesh pivot is not in where you want.
Sorry that I can’t really make a fair comparision without actually using the other tool.
No worries. The skeletal meshes and blueprint instances is actually a pretty big difference alone! And TBH yours looks a lot friendlier to use anyway Was just curious. Thanks for the honesty Very nice looking tool.
In UE4 you can change the pivot and set the pivot offset and such; but if you make the mesh rotate in game (like a door), it does not use that pivot but the original one.
Does this tool allow it to use the new pivot inside the game?
I’m half tempted to get this but I’d much rather enforce that our modelers actually do their work properly and don’t have pivots somewhere in outer space. This’ll make them go lazy.
What I’d love to see though is a fix for the fbx importer that imports the pivot based on the actual mesh pivot, not the scene origin.
Actor pivot offset in UE4 is an editor only feature, so you can’t use it in game. By baking the pivot offset into static mesh, you can rotate it in game using the new pivot. I made a video to demostrating the difference between origin mesh and baked one:
Quite true! Nothing beats planning ahead. It’s just that sometimes you dont always have the luxory to have artist around to help.
I could be wrong but as I remeber that’s already been implemented recently in 4.14 or so.
Anyway, talking about the topic, ill buy this tool when you release it. Im waiting.
I own other tool from you and its great, and the support that you give is outstanding.