Importing a Spaceship

Development Character & Animation
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Here is the Ship I made for the game I am working on. It is called a Puddle jumper, if anyone has ever seen Stargate SG-1 or Stargate Atlantis.
The object is made of many parts and materials, and I am looking for a good workflow for getting this in to the engine properly.
I have zero problems getting static models in to the engine, and no problems getting this particular model in to an Unreal project ‘as’ a static model(made of many parts), but I know it is going to need to be a pawn.
I was thinking of choosing one part to represent the largest portion of the model, like the outer hull, and then just “Parent” everything else to ‘it’. But I didn’t want to do all of that if it was not the correct way to assemble the model.
I want to be careful as there will be some basic animations that will need to happen too, like the doors opening(one set of double interior doors, and one outer door that pivots on its base)for example.
So before I do anything else I wanted to make sure that there wasn’t anything else that I needed to do in 3DSMAX or something else in blueprints so that it CAN be a Pawn…and fly of course with the animations I need ;O)

Also at this point in production I am looking for some help putting the actual game together.
I have most all of the models that will be needed to get the framework of the game together and I would like someone that can do that.
I will be posting in the proper place in the forums, i just wanted to add it here as well.

Thank you for your time :O)

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Import it as a skeletal mesh, it will make some things easier, especially if you want to animate anything on it. You can link objects and animate them that way since it’s a rigid object and it’s more work than necessary to skin it to a skeleton.

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Yep i second that :wink:

If your hierarchy is good in max then it will be good in UE4. You will be able to animate what you want by blueprint…etc…

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So import as one object, or each as a skeletal mesh? When I import as one object I get light-map issues.

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If it’s going to fly then it won’t need lightmaps since it’s moving around. Link the objects together and have a single root object that the rest of the parts are linked off of, it can be a dummy object if needed, then you import as a skeletal mesh.

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Be sure to have only one parent at the top of your hierarchy, then select all your objects then export. Like this, in UE4 you will have all your objects in one skeletal mesh.