Kind of a noob question but say I am making a huge piece of rock big enough for a player to climb up and walk around on. Theoretically I could make a real tiny scaled down model in maya, then bring it in to engine and just use the scale feature to make it take up the whole screen. Is there any disadvantage to doing this? do you generally want to start with a pretty large rectangle if the final goal is a really large object? Does scaling an object up or down affect in game performance?
Sorry I had intended to post this in the Content forums
well you should be ok doing that but I am not 100% because I have seen issues caused by scaling before although usually it causes no issues, if your that worried about it you should try a test model just to check and make sure you wont get any problems.
I moved it for you:)
You could conceivably encounter some fine grained floating point issues with scaling. Possible, but highly unlikely for most meshes.
If you prefer to work in a small scale in Maya you have two options. Scale your final model before exporting to FBX, or simply export your small model from Maya and notice during import to UE4 that there is a uniform scaling adjustment available.
Something I have learned to start doing is that I have a scale human model (there are several quality models available for free from Turbosquid) I almost always import into a scene before I start any modeling.
In fact I do it so often that I have a shelf button to automate it!
Unless you have extremely fine details (vertices) tightly packed together you will almost certainly never have an issue with scaling.