Here’s my current issue: I’ve been reading select threads on this forum about TurboSquid, mainly how their models aren’t really suitable for Computer games due to high poly count and other reasons.
Also, according to what I’ve read, it seems that a model around the poly count of 10,000 should be fine for UE4 purposes… or is it really? And no matter what the polycount, the FBX import instructions in the documentation seem to recommend the FBX 2014 format (with some forum posts suggesting that 2013/2016 should still be fine).
So essentially, I found this model from TurboSquid and thought it’d be pretty neat for my project. But it appears to have been designed for FBX 2013, the low-poly version has a polycount of a bit over 10,000 and before spending nearly 180bux on it, I’d just like to know if it can even be imported for the current version of UE4 smoothly, so that it’d adhere to the UE4 Epic mannequin skeleton and I could use it nicely.
(Of course, even if it was rather fine for these purposes, it’d be interesting to see how I can get it imported with my total lack of skeleton rigging skills)
Aside from that model, there are a few static ones (guns, crates) on TurboSquid that I assume shouldn’t be too hard to import into UE4… except that some of them are in OBJ format (I kinda doubt digging up my old copy of MilkShape 3D would be able to convert it for FBX 2014).
Poly number doesn’t matter. UE4 has built in LOD processing so if a model has 200k polies that means nothing, you can reduce LOD0 as well so the base model has whatever number of polies you want (by changing the triangle reduction setting in the LOD). The thing with Turbosquid is a lot of models don’t have second UV channels for lightmaps so you will have to create a second UV a lot of the time. Also; a lot of Turbosquid models have multiple sections in them that behave weirdly because UE4 imports them all as one section so beware of that.
I see… so technically it should also be feasible to, say, import something like this gun model (provided that FBX 2012 compatible models can be imported into UE4 without a hitch) and reduce its LOD values to make it viable for game usage?
And yeah, I do remember running into model import problems with games in the past, because the imported models had several meshes that would make up a larger body part (say, 3 meshes for one hand etc.), and they had to be grouped somehow to get them to animate properly. And by the looks of these TurboSquid models, they indeed appear to be stacked with detailed extra meshes as you said so a bunch of disruptive issues might come up… and I assume that to get past this problem you’d need Maya, Zbrush, 3D Studio Max or something before trying to import them again?
Automatic LODs are nice but they are not a substitute for manual work.
Every model you purchase will very likely require some extra work on your part. Either by dropping the triangle count, creating proper UVs, baking the right kind of details out of geometry into normal maps, number of sub materials and so on.
Once you’re satisfied with the result, you can then use automatic LODs for the extra triangle gains.
The problem with Turbosquid is people selling over there don’t know what game development is and what optimization is for.
Most of the time they focus on poly count, but polygon count is not the same of quality or detail (funny is many sellers over there charge more for models that have more polys)…
I see no benefits on buying models from there, the time required to fix those models are almost the same time I would expend modeling it yourself.
Example, this first bust is a sculpt over 1 million polygons and has no UVs. It is like 90% of the things you will find for sale on Turbosquid; while the second is below 10.000 polygons and have proper UV mapping with painted textures:
I don’t know about yout, but I like the low-poly one with hand-painted textures much more than that “thing” with over a million polygons.
The fact that the engine can handle any polygon counts, doesn’t mean you should neglect optimization, ever!
If a polygon face doesn’t add anything to the expressiveness of the model, in a game that poly-face should not be there.
Unfortunately, Turbosquid sellers do not think this way, most of the models being sold there has tons of unnecessarily polygonal faces, have no UV mapping and has close to no resemblance of any edge-loops on the meshes which will cause a lot of problems when you try to soft bind that mesh to an animated skeleton.
When I download free stuff from Turbosquid or any other free 3d model websites, I always open them in Blender and edit them. I do some edge disolving to reduce polys, delete lights or floors the person put in for the scene, and I also fix up the model and unwrap it and texture it properly. For me I could honestly model them myself, but I don’t have the time and it’s already done so why not? Plus I’m lazy with modeling.
They sell primarily for people who use the models for still renderings or cinematics. Offline; they can spend an hour per frame.
Polycount is what you want there for ultimate pixar style
