I am setting up a pipeline for creating assets and wondering if scale is important for the Engine itself.
The UE mannequin is close to 2 Unreal meters. Would it matter if my characters were ten times smaller or ten times larger?
The capsule component would of course change in size and perhaps the spring arm would go from my standard of 300 to 30 or 3.000. Would smaller numbers increase performance and larger numbers increase precision?
For physics, rendering, textures, performance and so forth; is this something to keep in mind?
Is it advisable to stick to the UE standards or can we just go wild with whatever?
Thank you for your time and may your day be a good one.
The simple answer is “yes” scale matters in all pipeline development tools besides Unreal 4.
All things created digitally these days makes use of physics based algorithms and is based on the “local” transform of the object that needs to be effected by modelled physics solution such as lighting, materials, or world physics behaviour.
As an example, as in what I do know, using an application like 3ds Max the local transform as to scale is only known upon creation as a parametric object so once converted to a poly object the scale value converts to world space.
World space scaling is also known as relative scaling as the object is scaled “relative” to other objects around it. The important value stored in the local transform does not change as to the relative scaling of the object and would snap to the origin scale once imported into Unreal 4 unless the Xform of the object resets the local scale to equal the wolds scale.
So yes messing around with scaling will drive you crazy at some point if it’s not set to be correct as to purpose of use. There is for example a few asset in the market place who’s scale is not correct as to use and takes a lot of effort to correct.
In most cases it is advisable to keep to the UE standards because all the systems have been built towards that. 1 unit = 1 cm. It gives you a reference for real life scale so everything is relevant to each other. Also if you make all your assets 10 times smaller or larger, the values you use for blueprints/programming would have to be exceptionally small or large, this could also potentially affect other things as well such as lighting quality and particle effects, etc.
… but you already know it does… didn’t you bring up floating point precision before?
Well there’s just that. A scale is a scale, sure. But if you shrink the base down then you are much more error prone as you’ll be working closer to the limit.
Conversely, if you scale up, you get less of an issue.
Generally speaking, the engine default scale handles almost everything you throw at it within 2k from 0,0,0.
So, I’d suggest sticking to the default scale unless there’s a specific reason not to.