Most of these details would fit an “advanced” panel, with the window only focusing on simple and crucial things about the mesh, its textures, and its collision.
Documentation doesn’t cover how to set the proper scale, orientation, and anchor point of an imported mesh. Would love it if I was able to control these as the software that makes the meshes doesn’t let me control these easily (or if the assets are made by a third-party and we don’t have access to the project files)
An example on how simplify the process is if we could get a popup window when dragging a mesh into the viewport that allows us to link to the pre-defined actors that we have to link meshes atm, instead of opening that window, placing an actor, renaming, then dragging the mesh to the mesh slot.
Would speed up the process if you drag into viewpoint, select what type of actor from the popup window, then you are done (naming is taken from the mesh)
If you want to add something as a real Fortnite prop (ie it wobbles when hit, gives resources when broken) you need to create a Blueprint and do some additional setup (e.g. what resource to spawn), as described in the docs.
If you just want to add the mesh into the level as a non-interactive mesh, you can just drag and drop the mesh from the Content Browser and it creates a FortSMActor.
I certainly agree there is a mix of important and esoteric option when importing meshes though!
I didn’t know that distinction, I was following the docs on importing content. Useful to know bc I don’t need them to break or wobble, would love to know the simple process as well (even the simple one has a lot of intricacies from what I see).
Hopefully our mesh import defaults are sensible, so the process could be:
Drag FBX into Content Browser
Hit Import on options dialog without changing anything
(mesh asset appears in browser)
Drag mesh from browser into level
(mesh instance appears in level)
It would be good to know which settings you need to change to get things to work.
This is the standard Unreal Engine flow, so there might be other docs/videos out there that go through it, as well as things like how it auto-creates materials if you have textures next to the FBX file etc.
That is indeed a great flow. In my case it was:
-Drag OBJ to content browser
-Double click it
-Remove collision and set up a box collision (I am still learning, so maybe its a bad step? I got the entire level to be a blocking volume if I didn’t do that)
-Set up the material by dragging it into the material slot
-Set LOD to high detail (or it will distort easily)
-Add a building prop
-Rename it to what the object will be
-Press its Static Mesh Component
-Drag the mesh there
-Scale it to 138 scale
-Weirdly move it into the scene as the pivot is far away.
I wonder how it is ending up with bad collision? What exactly was ‘bad’ about it? Was it massive? That doesn’t sound expected anyway. You can specify collision in the file (in FBX anyway, not sure about OBJ):
When you say you have to set the LOD or it will ‘distort easily’, what kind of distortion do you mean? Normally with no LOD set, it just won’t change based on distance, it just always draws the single LOD 0 that it has. Sounds like something weird is going on.
How are you creating this OBJ? Maybe you want the pivot adjusted in the asset before you import it?
It was massive, yes (re. Collision). For LOD, thought it was a necessary step to optimize for Switch/mobile, based on doc. For pivot, the software I used doesnt have a lot of control on that, and also what happens if the asset is from a marketplace (you cant edit the project file)? Thanks for the info though, this helps
You don’t NEED LODs set up to run on Switch/mobile etc, that is only required if your mesh is high poly and those platforms would struggle with it. It looks like yours are mostly quite low poly, so you probably don’t need to worry about it. We should make that more clear in the docs.
