I have changed my viewport settings to ‘User Power of 2 Snap Size’ (that’s the only setting I have changed and I’m not sure if I need to change it). Now I am trying to figure out what my grid size should be in Maya LT. I have changed my grid length and width to 1000 units which seems a decent size to work with. I have changed my grid lines to 100 per unit, now here is where I make a total *** of myself to the whole world lol.
I’m gonna level with you all here and say that I am no good at maths (even though this is pretty much simple maths). The reason I have set my grid lines to 100 is because as far as I am aware each unit on the grid is 1cm and within those units are 100 little squares (100mm = 1cm). So without making this more embarrassing on myself. Following the guidelines of the article above to model using the ‘unit system’ where everything uses the power of 2. Are these grid settings optimal to work with for making my modular assets? My apologize if some of you start thinking ‘hey, is this guy for real?’ but I just want to be sure I am doing stuff right so no problems arise later on for me. Maths is not my strong point, be gentle with me UE4 community
EDIT: These grid settings are for modular parts of a house, walls, floor etc.
You actually don’t need to bother with “power of 2” any more. That’s the old settings Unreal Engine 3 used. It took me a little bit to rid myself of making everything 512 or 256 units, etc.
One Maya Unity = 1cm = 1 Unreal 4 unit is how it works now. So a 500 unit wall is exactly 5 meters in lenght. It’s much easier and convenient than the power of two thing.
Important is also to know that the relative position on your grid in Maya is the position Unreal will import the asset at. So I usually place my front left vertex on the 0,0,0 position so all my meshes have their pivot point on the same place and are imported into Unreal at the same (0,0,0) position.
Another interesting thing is that if you hold “v” in U4 before dragging a mesh it will show you all the vertexes your mesh can snap to. It’s very useful! (I wish I could switch pivot points like we can do it by middle clicking a vertex on CSG objects).
The great advantage of the new system is that you can use real life values and don’t have to extrapolate power of two values for our objects. It’s probably also a great solution for people working from real-life reference, such as architectural blueprints.
If you have power of 2 in UE4 then you’ll want the same thing in Maya. So for example set your grid" length and width" to 1024 and “grid lines every” to 128. This will give you 8 grid lines. Set as many subdivisions as you want, say 2, 4 or 8.
Power of 2 literally just means numbers in multiples of 2.
Just to clarify, of course 1000 is dividable by 2, but the idea behind it all is that you go with multiples of 2 so you’ll never run into decimal numbers. Say you have a piece that’s 64 wide. You want to put one other piece and 2 smaller pieces into the same width. So let’s say one 32 and two 16. If the piece was 100 wide you’d have one 25 and two 12.5 which isn’t very convenient.
Thanks for the replies guys, it is really appreciated
@Gigantoad. I set my grid to what you suggested above in your example and it works perfectly. The FPS character is about 180cm or units tall, I am modelling this using a simple reference of a model I made to that size from MakeHuman. I have started modelling my walls to 256 x 256 which is perfect size for the default FPS character. Can’t thank you enough guys, I think I was over thinking things yesterday when posting this which made things a bit over complicated than it really was
The thread you got your original tutorial from is from the year 2005 - that should mean something. It’s really not necessary to do the power of two thing, because what you see in Maya (in centimeters) is what you get in Unreal (in centimeters, too). It used to be different in 2005, so they had the power of two thing. Ever since I started using Unreal 4 I dropped the entire idea of power of two, because when the buildings become more complex it is much, much easier to just work with straight values. I also find it easier to set up my grid in straight numbers instead of dividing everything with a quotient, just so I can use number of two values.
Only thing that needs power of two these days are textures. At least when you are using Unreal Engine 4.
I found power of 2 meshes in the First Person template and also in the Solus project example from Hourences. So I don’t know if that’s just because the creators got used to that in UDK or if the reason is actually what I decribed earlier.
This is my first project (and as you can tell I am still learning lol). It seems easier to work this way for me, there is only 2 people that are modelling on our development team (myself and another person) out of all the other methods I have found and read up about, this one seems the quickest and easiest that would work with a small group of developers
You can use a combination of modular & the standard grid. Both have pros & con.
By using power of 2, you can easily scale your modular building block to get whole number.
If you make a wall panel of 64unit, You can easily scale it down to 32, 16, 8, 4 etc, & expend it to 128, 256, always a nice integer value, & can snap nicely. However if you use say 50units, when you half it, you get 12.5, a non integer value,half again, you get even worst, 6.25unit, & then 3.125 units…
I think you get my point.
However, to make leg of chair, or cabinet, there is no need to stick to power of 2, since they will not be scaled. a leg size of 3x3x60 will do fine.
Yeah definitely agree there. This workflow is mainly going to be used on environment art, things like walls and doorways and some prop dressing like skirting boards (wall trims) anything that can be used again and is tilable
I’m having trouble setting up Maya to have the perfect settings for UE4 grid settings. So far I have this as my grid settings for Maya: Length and width: 1000 units
**Grid lines every: **10 units Subdivisions: 1
When I try to make a environment modular kit, the grid snapping does a lot of overlapping in both Maya and UE4. It’s very annoying and tiresome. From reading this thread, should I change the length and width to 1024 units instead? Also when I turn up the subdivisions, I hate how the grid gets so small and hard to see/snap as I’m modeling or moving a prop. I’m trying to keep my modular workflow to a power of 2 or at least close enough for some cases.
Well yes, for power of 2 you’ll want grid size 1024 or something like that. Same for “Grid lines every”. Although I’m not sure I understand your issue of “overlapping grid snapping”. Maya grid snapping will snap to whatever grid you have, right? In UE4 if you want to use power of 2 grid you need to enable this in the Editor Preferences > Level Editor > Viewports.
By what I mean’t by overlapping grid snapping is that my geometry overlaps over each other and only moves every 10 cc units when I turn on the grid snapping.
So I should have this as my settings? Length and width: 1024 units Grid lines every: 2 units Subdivisions: 1
That seems kinda of a pain do so, changing depending on the moment. When I change the subdivisions to 100, it just looks messy and you can barely see the grid unless you zoom in all the way.
Sure, although every 2 units sounds overly small. That would be every 2 cm. It depends how large your modular assets are going to be. My own settings at the moment are
Length and width: 1024000 units Grid lines every: 8192 units Subdivisions: 2
that’s for building large scale stuff though, but you get the idea.
