Hi, I’m interested in designing levels for my game in Maya as opposed to Unreal Engine, and exporting the level as one .fbx file. I Googled this topic found a post where and someone advised against it. They said something along the lines of “you wouldn’t want to do this, as it wouldn’t allow custom collisions” and instead recommend saving each object you intend to use in a level/scene as a separate .fbx and then designing the levels in Unreal.
How true is this?? Couldn’t I just make a UCX collision mesh for each object in the level designed in Maya? Would Unreal understand that the objects (in case of objects that are reused/repeated in the Maya level) are in fact instances in Maya rather than separate meshes?
Are there any disadvantages to doing this, if it’s possible?
I don’t use Maya, but I made a house a few years ago on 4.10 and did the UCX process you are talking about. The house had a second floor and stairs and it worked just fine with reading the collision. And when I tried again with a later version of the engine it wouldn’t read the collision. I don’t know if i did something wrong or the engine no longer reads it.
Landscape design is one thing. Importing a heightfiled is just that - importing a heightfiled.
its not the same as importing a mesh, and you definitely can either gain or loose resolution depending on on how you create and export the heightfiled file.
2nd thing.
UCX is liked to each mesh by name.
so UCX_test_01 is associated to the test mesh while UCX_anothertest_02 gets associated with anothertest.
Obviously, you should split up the different files and import/rebuild individually on account of the length of time you would spend waiting on both an import or an export to occur - but, if you wanted too, you can indeed import a bunch of assets all in one go, and the engine does separate them unless you click the specific button that prevents this.
Not really if your import splits the meshes correctly you still have to place separate meshes onto the scene.
the only difference will be that the meshes are already in place where they should be once you move them from the content browser to the scene - since they take their origin from the origin of the scene and are offset within it.
This works well for geometry and badly for actors. You may need to remove doors that have to be opened from the export and replace them with individualized meshes for instance.
That’s true for pretty much anything you expect to move inside the scene anyway…
in Maya or Max you would create the main mesh, add the meshes representing the collisions and group them in a single name (will be the name which UE4 will use to name the mesh), using UCX_mesn_NN, where _NN is optional and you will only use if you want one collision per LoD, so _00 for LoD0, _01 for LoD1 and so on. Of course you will only add extra collisions if you are going to provide the LoD meshes aswel, otherwise if you add the LoDs inside the mesh editor within UE4 Editor, the main collision will be shared by all LoDs.
Yeah, I just know it works this way, but I can’t find a good use case for it, unless the collisions are important and reducing the vertices on the collision brings significant reduction impact in performance… which I am unsure…
I guess it depends on how detailed your collision is?
The thing is at least in my case, if something is far enough to need a different LOD it probably doesn’t need collision at all as it’s out of range of most if not all things.
though I suppose you can change from complex to simple by having a lot of meshes to allow passage vs having just a solid one - if you are That pressed for vertex count…