I’m making my meshes in Blender, I was wondering does everyone make there meshes to life like scale or does reducing scale help performance. Because I’d like my game to take place in a town, but should I build on my assets to there life like scale?
I don’t know that you can get around making a “life like scale”. it’s really all virtual anyway. The limitation would be how large is your world within UE4, what can UE4 handle at any one time.
Think of scale more in relation to what UE4 is expecting. If you start to scale down your world because you want to make it super gigantic, you will encounter other problems that get affected by playing with the scale, such as speed the character moves, and jumps and other physics.
So yes, I work to scale. Essentially working in the game and visual effects industry is similar to how an architect pass on blueprints to work to “scale”, except that as a builder instead of building it outside for real, you build it in virtual space.
Know that UE4 is expecting CM (centimeters) as it’s scale of choice. If you like to work in feet in your modeler, make sure to turn your system back to centimeters when you export, because the import will be centimeters.
To test your pathway out, take something already in UE4, and bring it into your modeler. A character is a good idea. Let’s imagine that their character is approximately six feet (the gunslinger dude). Bring that into Blender and use that as a template so you know you are working at the right, and appropriate scale to UE4. If Blender is telling you the scale is wrong, then Blender may be set to something like feet or inches instead. (Not familiar with Blender here - so not sure how that import will come in but this is the technique that is a good check when working in any other software).
You will likely get other problems if not working to the right UE4 scale around other tolerance issues, like shadows and probably a whole host of things that would get highlighted by not working at the scale that UE4 is presenting at.
When you think about how to keep your frame rate high with big environments, consider level map design to help, LOD models (level of detail) to lower things further away down to low-res models and texture maps, and consider streaming in parts of your level, as well as streaming out.