Cutting out holes for doors and windows?

Hey,

I am using maya to create level element meshes. I have a few questions regarding cutting holes in the meshes that I will eventually be exporting to Unreal.

Imagine a blank wall section, that I want to punch holes in for eventual window frame and doorway meshes.

The only approach I know of at the minute is to use a boolean to create holes (if there is a better way, please let me know)

Question 1) I have used booleans in the past for this, and there seemed to be one major flaw - I can’t walk through the doorway in unreal, as though the boolean is still collided with? is that normal? Can it be fixed?

Question 2) does a boolean at all affect lightmapping? I have had issues recently with lightmaps and am really just getting my head around them now.

Thanks

Boolean is pretty much the way unless you want to get into MEL scripting.

Light maps are affected if your UVs are affected. Usually booleans create more faces, so UVs end up needing to be reworked. After you extract a boolean shape, check your UVs. You probably have some weird overlaps. Lightmaps need there to be no UV overlaps.

The collision error is caused by using simplified collision. In UE4, open up your static mesh and in the collision dropdown, generate a collision mesh that isn’t a simple box or sphere. You could also choose “Use complex collision as simple.” Unfortunately I don’t have UE handy right now so I can’t direct you to the exact locations of these options, but they exist.

you can also import custom collision meshes with your model, creating the collision meshes in your 3D app also gives you more control.

Thanks, will look this up when I get home this evening!

I don’t know if it’s still the case, but previously the boolean operation produced messy results. If it’s simple cuts (such as square doorways and windows), you can just manually insert edge loops where you want the door/window to be, delete the faces, and then insert new faces via bridging.