Gigantic mesh scaled down

Development Asset Creation
1

I downloaded a few things from an external source just to play with things as I’m learning how to do a variety of things. In this case, it’s a simple gun, but only came in a .3DS file. I used FBX converter to convert it to an FBX and imported it into my level.

When I placed the mesh, it was GIGANTIC. Just to give you an idea of how big this thing was, here’s a picture in relation to pretty much everything in the Infinity Blade series of free downloads on the market place. My guy is just under what would be the trigger of this funky gun.

GiganticGun.JPG
GiganticGun.JPG1152×693 63 KB

In order to scale it down enough that would be usable, I had to symmetrically scale it down to 0.012 just to look normal size.

Now my question is…

Would there be a performance hit from scaling down something so large that it would be unusable otherwise? …or does it look at the poly count and/or vertices and that means more than the physical size of it?

Here’s what it looks like scaled down to 0.012 next to a shotgun and the character I’ve been playing with…

GiganticGun.JPG
GiganticGun.JPG1152×693 63 KB

Also, how about the reverse of that. See the Sword next to the Character above? It’s original size was more like a sword shaped toothpick than a sword and I had to scale it up to 4.0 all around just to get it to look half way right.

Up till now I’ve only been playing with the things downloaded from the Marketplace and they’ve all been scaled appropriately. Is this normal to have to scale things up or down to fit your character or your scene/level or is this just the result of downloading random free things from the internet and they’re not scaled for functional use and probably better to not use them in a final product?

Thanks,

RJ

2

Fix the unit size on your modelling program. 1 unreal unit = 1cm

3

Scaling it down is fine, nothing cares how big something <was> so you should be fine. My guess is that gun was made in Blender (which natively does NOT play nice with UE4 in regards to scale)

You have either edit the scale yourself in a modeling program, or change your import settings to accommodate this model one time.

4

You can also rescale the static mesh in the Build Settings of the Static Mesh Editor and apply the changes.

With large meshes you have to be cautious of the bounds of the object keeping it rendered at further distances and the poly count is a factor as well in some cases. Scaling it down is fine since the bounds of the mesh are scaled with it.

5

Good tip. I didn’t realize you could do that. Might have to import a mesh, resize to what you want which will tell you what to size it as when importing. :slight_smile: Then just delete the original import and import again now that you know how to size it. I just used the same 0.012 size in the “Import Uniform Scale” and it was the same size as the one I scaled down, but now shows a scale of 1.0 when looking at the mesh. Again, Good tip.

Thanks! I think I’d rather just be able to drag and drop things without having to scale it every time, so that will probably be a feature used a lot in the future.