General Question on [Sense of] Scale within UE4 vs Maya/Blender/Max

Development Character & Animation
1

I’ve been designing an interior level based off of actual architectural blueprints, and have noticed that the sense of scale for the player seems off from the actual size. I’ve seen various reference pieces on scale, and I think I’ve also read that the default size of the character is around ~6’ (192cm) (correct me if I’m wrong). If this is the case why is the meshes, when brought into UE4 seem smaller than reality. For example, my wall would have a height of 243.84cm (8’), in UE4, the head of the player seems much closer to the top of the wall if they are truly only ~6’ tall. Granted, I am using an FPS template opposed to a TPS template, if that even matters.

I don’t know why this is the case, unless it’s just a strange artifact resulting from moving from our own perception to a flat 2d render of a 3d space. But looking at a reference from world of leveldesign, and doing some math based on average values listed here, it seems that I need to scale the interior architecture up 50% in the X/Y directions, and 10% in the Z direction. When I change the scale of the architecture within the modeling program up by these values prior to importing into UE4, the scale seems much more accurate in UE4 despite it being bigger.

Even when adding a mesh to the character, and pulling back the camera, the size of the default model seems sized more appropriate when all these values are scaled up opposed to the actual sizes of objects. Ultimately what I’d want to do, independent of the modeling platform, is create a architectural item to scale, and import directly into UE4 without having to scale up, as I’ve previously discussed. Not that it’s a problem, but its just an extra step I’d want to avoid. So with all that said, am I misrepresenting my units within the modeling program? (In this particular case, we’re using Blender) Is my character settings set incorrectly? Or is this just a side-effect of the way the engine renders objects? Why is this the case?

Thanks in advance for any discussion on this.

2

One thing is height of the character, which is much taller than average people. The second part is FOV, for architecture to work right I would propose to go with much wider than default FOV of the camera and add a top and down cut out (like wide screen movie format). For the exact values of FOV in UE4 check out VR or Architectural discussion, guys there should know it. Otherwise you need to do a bit of tweaking and math to match FOV to one of the standard optical lenses for modern cameras.

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Does changing FOV affect any other calculations that would cause more problems than not? Just curious. It seems like I once saw something a couple years ago about some values should be changed or they would affect animations or collision, etc Although, I’m not sure if that was FOV or not.

4

The FOV shouldn’t change collision or animation, since FOV (Field of View) is referring to how much of the world you can see from you point of view. @BoredEngineer is correct the base UE4 charactor (im referring to the 3rd person character) tends to be on the big side, when i create a scene i usually start with person block that is roughly 192x90x90~`and i create my base block outs from there then i import it and do a play through and see how it feels and iterate upon that if needed. Although you could create a BSP wall that feels right and export that out to max, maya or the 3d program of you choice and get the size of that and use it to create the rest of your environment.