I finally managed to reliably reproduce an issue that has been HELL for me to deal with for a very, very long time.
I often need to re-scale content, especially if it was acquired from third party content websites.
In order to do this, I am using 3ds max and the “Scale” feature.
However - UE4 doesn’t seem to want to reimport any changes that are done using either the scale or the rotate widget in 3ds max.
This used to happen only at random for me, until I made sure to follow through with all the steps and create a video of what is happening:
In this, you can see me opening a box in UE4 to show its dimensions, then re-scaling that box in max (by 200%), re-exporting it, and re-importing it into UE4, with nothing changing at all.
This is obviously a huge issue because there is no viable workaround, and it definitely is happening on the UE4 side, since when I reimport that same model in 3ds max, the dimensions have been scaled up by 200%.
Any ideas what’s causing it, and any ideas on how to fix it?
I have read through literally all the threads I could find related to this, and none of the suggested fixes are working for me.
Can you upload a normal scaled version and an up-scaled version of this FBX?
I’d like to see if it’s a problem with the FBX or the engine. I currently use Maya 2015/FBX 2014 and UE 4.17 and have no such issues. Also I’d like to see if Maya recognizes the up-scaling Max has done.
are you resetting the xforms? scaling objects can cause issues, it’s always better to scale the geometry itself. asset previewer is also not the place to find out if your scaling worked.
So, yes, I did the whole program. Reset xforms, make sure that no other import-relevant issues prevailed (such as broken UVs, invalid faces etc.)…
Regarding the Asset Previewer - it gives me approximate dimensions of an object, so if those do not change, then I think the logical conclusion is that the scaling did not work.
Both FBXs are the exact same size in UE4 after import, in spite of rescaling by 200% in 3ds max (which should also have affected the pivot / origin, but hasn’t for UE4).
Best regards and thanks again for your assistance!
yes, I forgot to log in when I posted pretty much the same thing further down in this thread:
In a freshly setup project, it works just like it should.
So I’m now wondering what caused it in the first place.
If I just checked or unchecked a box somewhere in the import-dialogue, then the problem isn’t one since it can be solved right away, but as I have had this thing happen to me in other projects across many different engine versions, that would be a big coincidence.
I’ll keep looking into it to track down what actually is happening (even though updating to 4.17 might solve the issue - for now).
Ideally you want them to be at a standard value of “1” (Same with translate values). In Maya this is done by “freezing” the values. I don’t know the Max equivalent to freezing though.
I suggest upgrading the Engine to a newer version and copy+migrating your project. Chances are it’ll will solve your problem.
EDIT: Oh, I also tried modifying the file and reimporting it, also worked without any problem.
I had replied to this again a couple hours ago, but unfortunately my reply doesn’t seem to have been registered.
Anyway, I solved it looking at the import dialog of my new project and comparing that to the old one.
The reason none of the scaling / rotating / repositioning changes were accepted by UE4 was that the box for “Transform Vertex to Absolute” was unchecked.
