Skeletal mesh (500mb) taking 14 hours to import

Hey all,

3 questions:
I recently created a snake character mesh and have a low poly version (49k tris, it’s a 9m long anaconda) that works fine, which I then subdivided twice to get a high poly version (3m tris) and imported into unreal.

  1. Which took something like 14 hours of unreal being completely frozen… (i5 14400f) Is that normal? I found posts complaining about meshes taking a long time but wow
  2. Even more concerning is that the high poly fbx file was 490mb, but the resulting uasset file is 1.6 gb. Is that normal?
  3. btw when I put some breakpoints in some code i could see that the fbx format called it 1.5m polycount (equal to the vertex count). so should I call it a 1.5m poly count or 3m poly count mesh?

I’m reading that some modern character models could get up to 50 million polys, which i guess would take a month for my PC to import with these apparent scaling laws

I searched for other posts on the subject here but the ones I found didn’t quite seem this extreme and were a decade old
I’m trying to ensure everything is up to standards so thank you for any advice you have!