I sub both Unreal Engine 4 and Maya LT. Getting my feet wet with both applications over the past few weeks, I’ve seen countless video examples of scene/level creations. I’ve seen some amazing level and character creations in Maya. One thing came to mind is, should scene/level creation be done in the 3d modeling app Maya LT or can Unreal Engine be used?
The same question could be applied to rigging and animation. I’ve created and have been playing around with a character model I’ve created in Maya LT. I guess my question is, should character animation be done in the game engine or 3d app? Is their a performance difference in either?
The primary workflow most use is to build modular geometry and/or assets that you bring into UE4 and assemble your levels there. It is not necessarily recommended that you build your entire level in any modeling software and export. This can cause several issues that would lead to more headaches than not.
The main reasons to build your assets separately and import are that you get the most control over your assets.
This includes collision, culling, texturing, performance, and mesh pivots to name a few.
If you were to build your entire level in Maya and export all objects in your Maya scene would have the world origin pivot from Maya of 0,0,0 even though the asset may be offset far from this point.
UE4 cannot create your animations for you. You will need to create these in Maya or any other modeling software that handles animation. Once your animations are imported you can check them and use an Anim Blueprint to build your character animations for use.
Your information was very helpful. Looks l like I’ll be spending more time with a Maya than I originally thought, to create assets, character, and animations to import into UE.
