Scale and Grid Snap Woes

I just started playing around with UE4 and I am importing a level and props that I have already modeled in max a couple years back, the problem is they are modeled in feet not meters (like prior unreal engines)
I was able to convert them (in the system unit setup, pre export) so they are correctly sized in the Engine but then the problem becomes snapping to the grid, nothing aligns properly. I’m assuming there is no way to change the grid to feet? so what would you guys recommend? manually scaling and sizing everything to the nearest cm? Any other options available?

Technically it doesn’t matter if you use feet, or centimeters or Max’s generic units, as long as your grid snaps are correct within Max. Depending on the units you use, things may come through at a different scale, but ultimately if your grid sizes were correct, you should get clean grid snaps, regardless.

So, since your original models were made for “prior Unreal engine”, the grid is actually different. In older engines the grid sizes were power of 2. Most likely your current content is created on this type of grid. With UE4 now Epic has changed this to be default, decimal grid sizes. They do however allow you to go to a power of 2 grid and you can set it in… Editor Preferences → Viewports → Grid Snapping.

i’m actually in the same boat with my project. I started in the UDK, doing everything on power of 2 and now in UE4, I can’t go re-size all of it, so I use the power of 2 grid size.

As a future tip, with Max and games, it’s in my experience always better to use Max’s generic Units. It always translates 1:1 to the engine, regardless of what the engine uses. So, say in UDK a power of 2 grid, say 16 units, is actually equal to 16 units in Max. And on that same grid in Max, if you make it now 10, that will translate to 10 units in UE4 directly on the decimal grid. For the export scale, just leave it on Automatic for the scale factor, and you’ll see the scale factor is then actually 1.0.

When you actually change the unit types, it’ll still translate when you set your grid to 10 or whatever, but when you export you have to pick the unit type and you’ll see the scale factor will change accordingly. In my opinion that gets more complicated than it should be. Using generic units will in fact always give you a 1:1 translation from Max to any other game engine.

Thanks for the helpful and very informative reply. The power of two option is very useful, I’m glad you told me about it. Yes my level is modeled in generic max units in multiples of two with 16 units being a foot. After playing around a little today, I will probably double the size of my models then import them 1:1 like you mentioned. Then everything will just be about 1.5 centimeters larger for every foot.