Custom Meshes for Terrain

Development World Creation
1

Hi guys,

So I’m quite new to Unreal Engine and we are currently building our first environment but I’ve already hit some questions:

  • Is there a way to use a custom mesh as terrain (custom terrain from houdini, or even something random like a large oil tanker)
  • if so how do I make the terrain playable for my character to run on. When I hit the ‘play’ button my character appears at the ‘player start’ icon but just seems to float around and not actually run on top of the terrain interactively?
  • If I add in a custom mesh as scenery (oil tanker for example) there seems to be a strange bounding box blocking me from jumping on top of it or getting near it, any way around this?

Any links to tutorials or vids would be super helpful and any help is much appreciated.

Many Thanks

2

Sounds like you haven’t set your collision up properly. By default the mesh will have this overarching simplistic simplex collision, like a box. That’s why you’re floating around like that. You need to set the collison correctly in Houdini, or change to using ‘use complex as simple’ in the mesh editor in UE.

3

Thanks for the reply.
So does this mean it’s actually possible to use an external mesh as terrain/level to run around on/interact with?

4

Sure thing. Very common practice.

5

Thanks clockworkocean, managed to solve this by saving as HDA format in houdini for a custom terrain. Although not sure how this would work if I wanted to bring in an oil tanker mesh as a level to run around on. Would I need to make custom collision objects for the oil tanker or change collisions to complex in UE4?

Many Thanks