Just a general question here, with maybe a sprinkle of heresy thrown in for flavor…
Two things which, to my knowledge, are gospel in UE5: Lumen prefers small, simple, modular meshes over large complex ones; and you should avoid overly heavy and complex collision geometry.
But… that doesn’t appear to be panning out for me in practice. Let me explain:
I made a big battle arena map, roughly 200 meters squared, packed with dense vertical architecture. I spent the last two weeks in Blender separating all of the pieces into smaller meshes and creating custom UCX collision for everything. It was pain.
Then, for giggles, I merged the entire level into one big mesh, imported it back into Unreal, and just used the dreaded (gasp!) Use Complex As Simple option for my collision geometry. The result: My framerate was not affected at all. I’m getting the same performance from what amounts to a thirty second copy-paste job, that two weeks of misery yielded by trying to handcraft UCX and breaking things up into reasonably sized meshes. What gives?!
On top of all that, I will need to do a complete reworking of the level in the near future, and now I’m faced with the question: Is it actually worth it to break my level up into smaller pieces, and make custom UCX meshes, or is that not something I necessarily need to bother with going forward? More to the point: What kind of pitfalls may be waiting in the wings for me if I don’t do things the hard way?