So I’m following some building plans to re-create a scene in UE4. I did some basic floors and walls in BSB’s to plan it out (measurements are exact) and when I hit play and load it, I look at it and realize that there is no way these measurements in UE could be in cm, everything is too small. If I were to create a 5mx5mx1m block, it barely looks 2m across. Has anyone experienced this? I started a clean project and can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong!
If this is just UE4, could I scale the camera’s perspective instead of going through and changing the scale and position of each object?
You should be able to change the camera in some way so that everything looks more in line. How you do that exactly I do not know but it should be possible.
Another possibility I was thinking of was being able to scale every object at once by selecting all. You seem like you know the precise measurements so if something only measures 2m when it should be 5m then I would just scale it up by a factor of 5/2. Every mesh that I’ve imported into the editor has needed some scaling so I don’t think it’s uncommon.
I know I could just scale everything up, but I was worried about needing to re-position every mesh’s origin if I scaled it; I was hoping the camera solution would be fairly easy…
Place a blue man from third person template into your level for reference. He is about 180 cm. So if he looks normal then your measurement is normal as well and things should look fine with 90 FOV.
I’ve been googling for a solution, since I stumbled on the same problem. I know I’m reviving a very old topic.
Looks like the scale should be like 110% or 115%, than all looks perfect. I wish there were some way to simply scale down the camera…
Did you guys find any workaround? I don’t think making all assets with weird scale is a good idea…
I didn’t find a way to scale down the camera and increasing FOV makes all badly deformed, so I thought maybe some post process for the fish eye could make a trick?
1 unit in blender is 1 unit in UE4. So that shouldnt catch you out at all.
Its also worth mentioning that you can measure stuff in UE4. In the orthographic views, use middle click and drag to measure. Make sure to turn off grid snapping, or atleast adjust it.
It may be that when exporting from your modelling program the model is being scaled differently. So double check that.
Scaling up all your objects in the UE editor is a bad idea. You need to adjust your fov and the character height to something other than 6foot (the standard characters height) Most people aren’t 6foot freaks
This topic has been tearing me apart for as long as I can remember…
What do I go for as a perfectionist: dimensions that are true to life or the ones that feel right in game?
I guess making a blend is not a bad solution.
Well, a lot of things are exaggerated in most games, door widths and ceiling heights. 3rd and first person games are exaggerated in different ways, and obviously gun placement in FPS isn’t realistic. And scale for VR games needs to be more realistic because you have a better sense of scale. and FOV makes a big difference to how large an level feels, and FOV for console games is closer to 60-70 because the player sits further away from the screen, and on PC, players like to use 90-110 FOV.
When you put a gasmask or eyeglasses “over” the visible scene, it feels much better…
For me this “bad feeling” came up most time, while entering a doorframe, or looking through small windows inside a room.
I ended up with running around, measuring everything in cm and modeling it 1:1 in Blender, but:
For me that “realistic” part is to timeconsuming.
Modeling a week, then baking, then rigging, after a month one model and in the end you do not use it…
Bad feeling for me personal not satisfying.
I decided with full force, to stay away from realism, or optical “errors” will take forever to fix for me.
The main thing for scale is to put things in the right ball park, and try to avoid anything claustrophobic or that might hinder movement. So bigger ceilings, doors, windows. Always throw a character in for scale to make sure it looks close enough to realistic.
Oh well, looks like we’re supposed to make everything bigger then.
Best way is to set the the "Uniform scale " in fbx importing dialog to something like 1.2 or whatever ratio you want.
This way I don’t have to set the scale inside of 3ds Max, since I need proper scale for other projects, and also, I don’t have to convert any of my models already done in proper measures.
For me 1.2 works perfectly. I just have to remember always to set it up while importing the fbx.
Fortunately it can be found inside the static mesh settings under “import settings”, so whenever I reimport the mesh it always does it with that scale I set.
Now I’m not worried anymore that I’m doing something weird scaling all up, so time to work!
Thanks guys for your opinions.
I’m sorry but my all body is cringing. I am a perfectionist and I like doing thing that are going to look the size I made them. I am making a room 10x10 meters and it looks so so small like 4x4 meters and it’s killing me. How is it possible to have a height which seems correct (2 meters looks roughly like 2 meters, I say roughly because it looks a bit small too) but when you make a room it’s horribly, cringingly too small. I mean 100m² is immense in real life, and in UE it looks like a kids bedroom… what the f ?
First I’d liked for someone to explain the phenomenon so I understand why it is so weird, and then tell me why there is no solution, expect winging it and making size completely random. And try as if I’m stupid and understand nothing because I really need to understand why, and after reading multiple topic I don’t seems to grasp why. And if I don’t know why I will not be able to not use perfect measurement and it’s going to kill me inside slowly…
Being a perfectionist is the worst possible trait to have when trying to be productive. It causes extra stress and anxiety, and slows down progress to the point where you do not finish anything.
The only way to get a great sense of scale in a virtual environment is by using VR. Field of view is a horrible but necessary compromise to make a 2D display show a 3D scene, your distance from your monitor and size of the monitor will effect what FOV would be most natural.
Typically first person games use a pretty high field of view so the player is more aware of their surroundings, but this does also make things feel smaller.
Game exaggerate the size of doors and hallways to make them easier to run through, and exaggerate the shapes of objects to give them more visual weight, and often to look better in realtime, these tweaks can affect scale perception.
Reference points is the most important thing when it comes to scale, if there’s character our minds instantly judge how big things are relative to that character, and it happens with all sorts of things like tables, chairs, windows, door knobs, railing, etc.
Sometimes, unit translate wrong. If system unit is inches, but get imported as centimeters, then you’ll see things 2.5x smaller than they should be. You can easily compare this by creating a 100x100x100 block in Unreal and looking at it in comparison. (Also, the Unreal grid should help.)
Sometimes, the camera is deceiving. We’re so used to how cameras “should” behave in games, that the same kind of camera in an accurate world-scale scene makes everything seem small. Again, a known block size (100x100x100) or known character size (blue man) will let you see what the scale “really” is.
For gameplay, games will generally builds corridors, rooms, and halls that are of giant proportions. This is because we don’t get the body-derived cues from the real world, when playing in a 3D game with a controller or keyboard. (VR is better at this, and requires less scaling up, btw.) If you’re used to game levels, then a real-world level will seem tiny by comparison.
I´m glad this topic is still alive, because I have the same problem and don´t know how to solve it. I´d like to create a small hotel room (4 x 4 m) . In real life, it would be large enough to have a bed, table and chair and you could move freely. In my level (max->ue4 scale is set up correctly) the camera collision is giving me trouble (3rd person view) . I´ve set the springarm length to a short distance, but it still collides with the walls. Turning collision off is no option.
The whole room looks also very claustrophobic. The character is quite tall (1.90m) and the props are all up to scale with real life and character. I´m using the standard FOV setting - other settings don´t seem to look real. If a change the size of the room, everthing will look out of scale, right? Would it be better to have a fixed camera in these rooms (old resident evil cam) ?
How do other games and also film makers solve the “small room” problem?
