Importing bunch of meshes with LODs automatically - possible?

Development Asset Creation
1

I have a terrain that is split (for now) into 16 pieces (depending on the area of the terrain it could be more eventually). Each piece has 3 LOD iterations (base, LOD1, LOD2). The way people do it in several tutorials online is that they manually export their LODs into separate FBX files, then import them one by one.

This horrible workflow and not only for my terrain. Imaging having 100’s models for your game, each having more than 3 LOD iterations… I can hardly believe Epic artists would sit there can manually import each and every mesh individually and set up LODs for every one of them (unless they hire bunch of Igors to do that mundane job :rolleyes: )

Is there a better way of importing bunch of static meshes and automatically set up corresponding LODs ? (probably special naming for scene objects in 3D app, exporting into a single FBX file and then UE4 automatically put it all in proper order?)

Thanks

P.S. Working in Blender; UE 4.11.2

P.P.S. If it’s not possible, maybe there is a way to automatically export (batch?!) each mesh and corresponding LODs into FBX files with appropriate filenames, so it would be easier to import manually into UE4? (mesh01_LOD0.fbx, mesh01_LOD1.fbx, mesh01_LOD2.fbx for example)

2

AFAIK the only way to get the LOD’s from one model is to use Simplygon or InstaLOD or similar plugin.

HTH

-Edit-
A alternative could be a modification to the engine importer dialogue to set different lods for importation, But that still requires multiple models.
Unless you can access the different LODs inside the FBX file and add that to the importer modification.

3

Sounds like in Maya one can make a LOD group that includes LOD iterations, and UE4 would import and set it up accordingly in one go.

I am looking in something similar, but with Blender.

4

Read this:

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Content/FBX/StaticMeshes/index.html#staticmeshlods

5

I did, yesterday, before making my post here. Blender doesn’t have LOD groups like Maya does and the docs refer to Maya, not Blender.

6

Hmmm…

Yeah I don’t tend to use blender, but I’m wondering if there’s a naming convention you can use to get the same result? Just thinking out loud, but have you tried to mimic the naming convention for LODs in Maya or Max with Blender? It’s FBX so it might work?..

Sorry, don’t have anything else for you to try…

Not ideal, but you can manually add your LODs through the static mesh editor in Unreal 4, have you tried that?

7

[MENTION=13213]Jak Carver[/MENTION]: Yeah, I did it manually yesterday. No fun doing that for 16 pieces, each having 2 LODs besides base mesh.

Apparently Blender doesn’t support exporting LOD groups. Not with hierarchy, not with naming convention. That’s something Epic should add to FBX importer in UE4. This way no matter what package FBX is exported from, as long as naming convention is kept, LODs would be set up automatically.