I have a question about the a model that i need to insert in UE4.
The model is a ship composed by many objects as children (over 1000). I export it from 3d Studio as a BFX model and import it to UE.
Although i export it as a model with many objects when i import it at UE appears as a single model and not a model composed by many objects. The same object is imported normally at Unity Game Engine as a .3ds file and appears as a model composed by many children objects.
How can i maintain the structure of many objects?
When i import all the objects, they are placed correctly and the shape of a ship is composed. How can i handle this bunch of objects without selecting them seperately?
you can create a hierarchy in the engine of those assets, so when you select the parent piece all the rest follow. Drag the assets in the world outliner on top of the asset you want to be the parent
Unity creates an empty object that can be parent of others. Unreal has to use a part of the model to be the parent?
Another problem i encounter is that when i press Play, i cannot approach the model and the only direction, I can move is backwards and away from my model, while the Player Start is labeled “Bad Size”, even when i move it far away from the model. Is this an export (i exported using 3ds ) issue?
First: If you want all the objects to be animated as a single rig, you will need to “skin” the model, where you bind each component to its own node/dummy/bone. Unreal doesn’t import hierarchical rigs as hierarchies.
If the “collect all the assets into a single object” method works for you, that’s fine, too.
Unreal doesn’t create the overall objects for you, but you can create your own Actor (or Pawn) Blueprint that you drag all the meshes into.
Note that “scene actors” and “actor blueprints” are different things. If you build the actors in the scene as a big mesh, that does not translate to any other map/level. If you want to be able to “place” the object, you have to build it as an actor. There are functions to “harvest” objects from a scene and turn them into a blueprint, though, so you can do that conversion later.
Finally, most developers who have more than a one-off need, will use their own scripts on top of Unreal and their DCC (Maya or 3ds or Blender or whatever) and will typically use Datasmith as an interface layer for the data. This way, you can make whatever conventions you want in your creation tool, and export to unreal, where the data can come in pre-teched the way you need it, by way of the script doing the right thing. Therefore, the Unreal standard importing paths don’t try to create “fully final” assets, because what “fully final” means varies a lot between games.
