hi there, complete newbie here and just looking around inside Unreal engine, considering leaving 3D studio Max/VRay behind and using UE for architectural visualisation, importing 3D models from Sketchup…I have a question regarding proxy objects. I would normally use vast amounts of furniture in a Max scene rendered with VRay, the furniture being created as a vray proxy to reduce the loading on the size and complexity of the model, to speed up render time and keep a model more stable…can Unreal Engine create proxies or is there some alternative way of managing high poly repeated objects?
thanks in anticipation!
In UE4 you would import things into the project and it will show up in the Content Browser which will be a library of all of the content.
When you place it in a scene, it will be an instance of that object, so all copies will only reference one object in memory. There’s additional things you can do to improve performance, for example you can set up Level of Detail for an object, where it you would have multiple detail levels and it can switch between them when you get close enough.
The biggest issue that you’re going to run into when using UE4 for archviz though is that to get the best results you’ll need to use baked lighting, which requires UV mapping everything to create a UV channel for the lightmaps. UV’s have to fit in the 0-1 space and not overlap.
thanks for that, good to get understanding of UE capabilities…appreciated!
“When you place it in a scene, it will be an instance of that object, so all copies will only reference one object in memory.” - is this accurate? if I drop 30 static meshes into a scene I don’t think they are instances by default?
By default it will only keep one in memory, but each will still add to the number of draw calls. You can use Blueprints to do a different type of instancing where it will batch those objects into fewer draw calls but it’s something you have to manually set up.
Ahh - thanks for the clarification 