Good day dear community,
within the scope of a project of my university we were tasked to model our local library from the given floorplans in Blender and use it as a base for a level within an Unreal Engine Thirdperson game template. I am turning to you in order to know what would be the best approach in terms of a workflow to tackle this problem as a 3D Modelling noob. The building in question is unfortunately tied to a complex triangular shape with loads of pillars/columns, subdivisions with multiple rows of windows and big angled windows at the front. So far I modeled the building in its entirety in blender and exported everything as a single fbx file, which in turn I imported into UE. This resulted in an okay attempt but a few things, namely pivot points and collisions were amiss but also the sheer amount of static meshes given the amount of windows and pillars, so I had to edit those manually.
What would you propose is the best way to handle this task? Model the entire building and import it, model every used asset individually and "put together"everything in UE to reduce the static mesh bloat and need to edit every static mesh individually?
We have created many digital twins and our workflow includes modelling in Blender. I’m on the move right now and have my team revert to your query soon.
Focus your project on modular modeling in Blender of key elements like pillars and windows to reduce the complexity of your Static Meshes. Assemble these assets efficiently using Unreal Engine’s modular approach, ensuring proper pivot points and collision settings for better integration. Library Consider optimizing textures and materials in Unreal Engine to improve the performance and visual fidelity of your 3D simulation game.
If you were building in 3ds Max, Datasmith would be the answer. Every column and wall could be instanced in 3ds Max and then imported as an instance in Unreal, avoiding the issue of thousands of unique assets that are actually duplicated. There is no Blender support for Datasmith unfortunately.
In this case, creating it in true game industry standards, you would build modular components and assemble in Unreal Engine as pelorustech mentioned.
Perhaps an editor tool that would replace objects by name with a targeted instance could work. It would need to generate a HISM keeping the elements offsets.