Managing exported objects/meshes (from CAD)

Development Asset Creation
1

Hey,

has anyone experience of working with and editing CAD models (in my case from Catia) in UE4? Let’s say I have a product/assembly created in Catia, with different part/components included and the parts have some features (holes, extrudes etc). Is it possible to manage part for part, or feature for feature in UE4?

When I import an object now everything becomes one single mesh and it’s impossible to edit something, except the scale of the entire mesh. I’ve tried several ways to import it (through Blender, Autodesk FBX converter etc etc) without any luck.

Basically my goal (read: dream) is to get the same object structure i UE4 as I have in Catia, something like:

Product
-Part 1
-PartBody 1
-Pad/Extrude
-PartBody 2
-Hole
-Part 2
- PartBody 1
-Revolve

And from there be able to point at an element in the structure (for example the hole) and create a Blueprint script, let’s say for the hole radius.

Is it even possible to “explode” an mesh and create a structure of the elements?

2

On the import options there’s a checkbox for Combine Meshes, if you have separate meshes then that should control whether they get imported all together as a single static mesh or if it separates it out.
However, it will not import a hierarchy of parts, they will all be separate pieces you have to place back together. There’s also very little ability to do modeling changes to a mesh, so for instance changing the radius of a hole wouldn’t really be possible unless you want to get into some complex programming.

3

Thanks for your answer! But the problem still remains, I unclicked the combine mesh box but I still get one single mesh (Tried with both parts and assemblies of parts). In Blender I’ve got all the objects/meshes separated so it’s not the Catia->Blender export that fails. Has it something to do with the export settings in Blender maybe?