I’ve been working on various sandbox world experiments, I currently have a javascript world viewer that uses three.js to import collada models.
Does UE lend itself to creating sandbox projects where anyone can import models and they are loaded programatically, instead of via the UE editor. Can I just do something like:
actor = new Actor
actor->loadModel(“/tmp/something.fbx”);
scene->add(actor);
Or is UE designed so heavily around the editor / content pipeline that you can’t really use it like this? I’d much rather use UE than Ogre. Even if I have to convert the models to .fbx on the server side.
Currently the fbx importer is within the editor so it isn’t compiled for games. Additionally the processing steps for optimizing the mesh and creating collision and physics data are in the editor as well. These are somewhat expensive tasks to perform at runtime and creates a lot of editor only data so we haven’t made it available to games. With source code access you can of course change this yourself if you want to. We’re in the process of converting the fbx importer into a plugin which should make it easier to get the raw mesh out of fbx and create a static or skeletal mesh from it at runtime if you’d like.
Could you add the Sony Collada library to your C++ code and import the stuff there,
then transform the output into what the unreal engine requires…
It’s most certainly gonna bust your balls… but if you do it, you’ll be a hero.
