Can anyone point me towards a good tutorial for building meshes in Maya for UE4?
I’ve been using Unity. I was designing larger level areas in Maya as one file (A fully furnished house, for example). I could bring in the mesh and add my materials to all the separate groups within that build (a chair, for example).
That same workflow doesn’t seem to work with UE4. Anything I import comes in as a single mesh. I can’t, for example, apply a glass material to just the window on my house. All geometry comes in as one single chunk.
Now, am I doing something wrong? Or does my process need to change? How do you guys go about building your geometry. Any good tutorials for this kind of thing? I tried, but didn’t find anything.
Building entire levels in 3D applications and exporting them wholesale to Unreal is not a standard workflow, and it doesn’t take advantage of the features of the engine. It’s designed for you to build individual meshes (modular if you can) and export those. Then import them into the Content Browser and set up materials and other settings. Then place them in the level inside Unreal Editor.
Make sure you have the option “Combine Meshes” unchecked while importing your “scene”. It will then import all models as a separate model, but be warned the pivot of any model will be “wrong” due to the way Maya handles x,y,z. Not Epics fault!
Chris, I don’t see that option in my Maya export settings. Any idea where it might be?
I will definitely start exporting my items separately. But I still think there will be some situations where it just makes more sense to model it all together - a desk with a very cluttered surface, for example.
I never used Maya, but if materials are setup right you can have 61(more if tweak the code) for each model.
Both these models are imported as a single mesh, but have more then 50 different materials with detailed collison, and framerate is great even before any LOD´s are used.
A modular mesh is a model that can be reused, like walls, doors, windows, sinks or whatever else is repetitive. Reusing meshes (models) not just helps with the performance it also drastically reduces the time you spent on asset creation.
Right below the Normals Dropbox.