I haven’t begun any development on this, so it is more of a thought experiment. Is it possible for the player to use their own FBXs if they were to put it somewhere in the directory of the game? I understand that Unreal creates .uasset’s when anything is imported into the editor, so I’m wondering if there is a way around this after the game has been shipped. There is probably some complicated way to do it with code, but as an artist, I wouldn’t know where to start. Thanks!
I don’t think that’s strictly possible, especially when you build a shipping version of the game because everything gets compressed into a big .PAK file by default (though you can change that).
If you don’t mind my asking whats the reason for them to do so? There could be some workarounds, like building a really simple mesh editor or something. If it’s just minor appearance changes you want to make maybe Material Instances are something you could look into? You’d be amazed at how far you can push them and with Blueprint you can probably put a simple but effective model-editor together that uses different pieces you’ve already made. Documentation for those bad-boys here: Instanced Materials | Unreal Engine Documentation
I can’t find the thread but a while ago there was some discussion around end-user mod-ability of the games you ship, and the current option is that you ship with editor enabled and the users can buy a UE4 editor license and play with the content that way (from Tim Sweeney himself). Plus it brings them right into the community too which is a big plus.
Thanks for linking that post, Jacky; it didn’t come up in the first few searches I tried. TheJamsh, the idea I have in mind would specifically need custom meshes, not editable items.
From the thread that was linked, it sounds like using Unreal’s importer would not be allowed for a public release. Are there any workarounds besides creating an importer from scratch (and how hard is that)?