Sorry, one more question, I am so interested in your plugin:
Often I am in a market place asset, and the asset creator just made a asset not modular. Switches, buttons, wheels (eg. wheel for a valve), cables, etc.
Is your mesh tool able to right away cut a mesh into these kind of peaces and perhaps making very small correction to the UV/Textures? Because of course the small filed where you make the cut of the mesh in two meshes had no UV-map before and no texture before.
(Most of the time the cut of the mesh would be enough, because nobody will be able to the the mesh side where the meshes lie on one another. So be able to cut the mesh, also when it is a bit more complex mesh, would be most important)
Hi , I bought your tool to cut doors into larger meshes with single faces. Could you point me to a tutorial on how to cut small chunks from a single larger face, thanks.
Example
Sorry that I’m on the road from Nov.20 to Dec.15 with limited internet access and not be able to reply in time.
@TheFlow3k the Engine’s mesh editing solution branch (dev-geometry) is actually already in engine now (just need to be activate from console). It’s a good framework to build functionalities upon, I believe that’s what Unreal Studio is doing now. And If I’m writing Mesh Tool now, I’ll surely take advantage with the Engine mesh editor API. I do had a short conversation with Mike Fricker regarding the mesh editing framework Epic’s working on last year, and it’s quite clear they’re more focus on building a robust framework first while I’m making Mesh Tool a little more practical tool (and not as robust)
The plane cut tool could be used to cut un-seen faces from a complex mesh. One missing functionality from the plane cut tool is to fill the cross section from the cutting.
@unit23 One possible solution is 1. Inset the face 2. Scale/Translate the insetted face to the size you want. I’ll see if I can record a video in next 2 days.
Is bevel coming to the mesh tool any time soon?
Is there a way to edit a mesh with it’s flat surface? Say I have a foliage mesh and I want to edit its polys, but its difficult in 3D space with it moving around and a bunch of faces behind the one I’m trying to edit haha. Like a 2D mode with the polys flattened out?
Hi I’m a total noob, I’m trying to figure out if this tool might help me. I will post a detailed explanation, I’m sorry if this feels out of place, but otherwise it would be too difficult for me to properly explain myself.
Basically using either the static mesh cone or the bsp cone I can’t achieve what I believed was very simple: to create an n-sided static cone, to apply a texture with a planar mapping and to use it as instanced mesh (as I plan to use lots of them).
I’m used to another (incredibly old) 3d engine, and in the attachment I post what I could do with it.
Instead this is what I get in UE4 basic meshes
And by using BSP
So there’s multiple problems: as far as I could understand the basic meshes cannot be edited, even for UV I should use an external program and import them, plus there’s no way to set the number of faces.
With BSP I can set the number of faces, which is nice, but every face is treated as an independent actor. Plus they can’t be instanced as static meshes.
All of this long introduction to ask: with this tool is it possible to create a mesh (either cone or sphere or cylinder etc.) with an arbitrary number of faces? is it possible to apply a material with different UV mappings? since the tool creates static meshes can these meshes be used with instancing?
Thanks
Is this something you plan for the tool?
The functionality to cut bigger meshes into peaces, right in UE4, would be really nice. But for this I think it is needed that on the cut-side is “no hole” after cut (like you said “fill the cross section from the cutting”), but a simple plane face on the cutting-edge would be sufficient.
Of course the cutting edge has no texture, would be good when you could assigns it a new UV layer and in UE4 user should be able to assign it a own material layer (static meshes can have several materials assigned, but you know that of course.). Or perhaps you have a better idea about UV and texturing, when cutting something into peaces. Perhaps some options to choose from (New material layer possible. OR lay UV above existing UV/texture to use exisiting texture, perhaps manually positioning the new plane face-UV on the existing UV/texture).
Purpose:
When you have bigger meshes and right in the game engine you see, that you have to make them move-able / intractable:
For Example:
- a clip of a grenade
- wheel which is static on a pipe mesh
- wheel which is static on water-tap
- small peaces of a weapon mesh
- Other small things like buttons on a desk, switches, etc, which are included in a bigger mesh
Simple kind of mesh interior:
- Would also be nice to have a tool/process to automatically add a (simple) interior, for example if a box-mesh with a top-cover is a one bigger static mesh, to cut the top cover and make interior in the box. Interior should have (as automatically first try) the same texture as outside. Of course this must give the user tools/option, like “how big is the space inside”, “how big should be the hole”. In the end you could achieve this also with subtracting meshes. Generate a rectangle temporary mesh, put it inside the bottom of the case you cut the top cover of, subtract the rectangle temp volume from the rest of the box-bottom mesh … and there it is, the box has space inside.
Here again, something to automatically ad faces when subtracting sides would be needed. Generate some UVs, and a nice UV algorithm which “copy the outside texture inside” (or better described “to place the new inside face UV on the texture, so it has the same texture as outside assigned”). And as option user should be able to choose to add have a new material for the new faces. So you can use your procedural materials for the “new inside”.
This would be great!
Hello ilbiffi,
I think the problem is the way you did it.
Your pic under “And by using BSP” shows the same texture part on every face. As I think, you do not need it like this. Click your brush and select all faces, you can do it with “brush details” undr “geometry” section, “select” –> “select matching material”.
When you have not added material to a surface before, it will select all faces directly. Then, in the same section “geometry” click “alignment” and “align surface planar”. This will do some UV mapping for you, so your faces have a good alignment on UV map.
When I understand correctly, without doing it, all faces have a similar spot on UV map (as seen in your pic), one above the other, because of that your pic shows the same texture-part on every face. But when you align it, then the full texture will be used for your whole mesh.
In “surface properties” sections, you can also try some options to switch UV/Texture mapping a bit. (position, scale) I am not sure, if you will get the same result as in your “old engine” because it seems it spotted the middle of your texture/UVmap correctly, but perhaps you will get the same result also.
I also think the options for brushes (and modeling directly in the engine) could be extended much more in UE4. Also more options for UV unwrap the brush (“dynamically” move a face on the uv-map/texture-map).
And one more question to . It is possible to turn a static mesh into a UE4 brush with your tool? Until now, I never understand why the UE4 engine is not having this option available in default. Is it such complicated to male a static mesh a editable UE4 brush again, when it is made a static mesh one time?
This would be nice, to we could use UE4 brush options and ue4 brush editing on static meshes, by make them a ue4 brush.
@TheFlow3k that’s not possible, and is also a bad idea - UE4’s brushes are terrible for performance (for no good reason) and you shouldn’t use 'em.
In case anyone is curious, that command is MeshEditor.Enable. It’ll then appear under the Modes tab (shortcut key Shift-6). It’s all pretty undocumented at this point (and unstable, as to be expected for WIP), but pretty cool to mess around in.
Yes, it is really curios. I “googled” a lot a few days ago, before posting here the questions. I found nearly nothing and in the end it was very unclear what is really in the engine now and how to use it. Thank your for your advice in detail! That is the first time I read how we can use it and I will try tomorrow.
@ilbiffi: Do you understand my explanations? If not, tell me and I try again. 
Hello , don’t get me wrong: I never wanted to develop a game with brushes and ship it with brushes. It’s only (and I hope like I described it already like this) to make a brush out of a static mesh, to use the “brush editing capabilities” of UE4. For example, the things I explained ilbiffi a few posts above about UVs and scale. And also the other things you can use on brushes in UE4 einginge, like move vertex and change faces, also subtract brushes, etc… All available in the UE4 engine for for brushes.
But of course, when you finishes editing, you make again a static mesh out of the brush, to have a only static mesh as edited final product. It’s only about switch to a brush to use UE4 Brush/Mesh editing tools.
And to use UE4 brush tools, I was asking if his tool support to turn a static mesh into a UE4 brush. As I said, I never understand why this is not available as UE4 default functionality. I think it’s very useful, for everybody who has not Nates mesh editing tool and want to make some very simple changes to a meshes directly in the engine.
Yup! It’s a module of the “Editable Mesh” plugin (which the separate Mesh Editor plugin is reliant on). I had to dig through the GitHub repo to find the commit that added the command, it’s not documented anywhere else: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/commit/4c19e8584320c5a27d4d26839a20ddd558de8ae0
Right now it’s not very stable, I’ve found that using the “Draw Vertices” function seems to crash the editor with a segfault 3 bytes in (likely a null pointer). That’s happening with both the OpenGL and Vulkan backends.
I can’t test DirectX as I’m on Linux, and I don’t have access to Windows, so if someone can test out “Draw Vertices” on a Windows machine and let me know the results, I could probably submit a bug report.
Hi,
I’ve been playing with this plugin and I’m struggling to find the Auto UV check box that’s mentioned in the documentation. I’m on UE4 version 4.21.
The documentation says it’s in the Object panel but I don’t see it there. There are some UV options but the whatever I set them too the UVs are still distorted after a uniform scale.
(happy to provide purchase receipt if required)
Very bad idea indeed.
Suddenly at the project’s load i started receiving Warning which says:
“LogSlate: Warning: The command ‘MeshToolEdMode.SeparateEdge’ has the same default chord as ‘MeshToolEdMode.TurnEdge’ [T]”
What could it be? Thanks!
Hi @, not sure if this is related to the issue in the last post (#542), but I’ve just triggered an engine update, from 4.22 to 4.22.2 and it can’t be completed because Mesh Tools can’t be downloaded (it’s in an endless queuing state). Has Mesh Tools been taken down temporarily? TIA (and thanks for such a great plug-in!)
Quick update. I have no idea what went wrong. The launcher wouldn’t let me uninstall either UE or disable the Mesh Tool plug-in. I had to manually remove 4.22/4.22.2 (it was impossible to figure out which version it was on after the failed update) and then start a fresh version install. Just to be on the safe side I disabled MT in the Downloads panel during the install, and then added it again afterwards. Anyway, Mesh Tools + 4.22.2 all work fine now.
I am getting the same error, did you ever get this figured out?
"Suddenly at the project’s load i started receiving Warning which says:
“LogSlate: Warning: The command ‘MeshToolEdMode.SeparateEdge’ has the same default chord as ‘MeshToolEdMode.TurnEdge’ [T]”
What could it be? Thanks!"