I am working on a project which is like a mesh viewer, which allows user to access local file system, select file, import and view the object in the application(win32/64). can I implement such mesh(fbx,obj… ) loader appilication to view objects?
Well, the better question in this case is…why would you use a game engine to write a mesh viewer? That is highly overkill imo. You’re much better off just throwing together OGRE3D, OIS and one of the many GUI libraries for OGRE3D and building a quick application rather than using a whole game engine to display some meshes…
acctually, my final target is to make an app which people could walk around a park under ue4 realtime rendering, also they could import their own model.
just need to support ONE format (.fbx,.obj,.uasset …)
Unfortunately, to go this route you’re going to have to write your own .FBX/.OBJ/etc importer. UE4’s built in importer(s? I think its just fbx these days) are in their editor module. It is also against the EULA to move any of the editor modules over to runtime. If you have a decent amount of C++ under your belt, parsing model formats should be trivial after you google them. After you get the mesh information, you can create use it to generate the mesh at runtime. Refer to this article to learn how to generate meshes at runtime. Yes, the article says procedural, but it’ll show you the functionality to actually create the mesh and send it to the GPU.
or is it possible for me to pack models to .pak file and the load it at runtime?
Hi zacharymwade , thanks for your reply. It looks like for importing file formats such as fbx,obj is illegal then.
however another solution i have got is:
first, I could import and edit a mesh file in editor manually.
then, pack it as a .pak (or something else?) and upload it to a online filesystem. so the player could download the .pak file and import the mesh into the application.
is this workflow possible? if yes, how could i make it ?
I’m not very knowledgeable in this area, but you could go with a mod system. Doing it this way, people can import their own models if the have access to the UE4 editor (which…since it is free…everyone does). Check out this tutorial by Tom Looman, I’ve heard it is rather informative.
thats really helpful. thanks a lot!