There is a pretty big omission in video 3.1 in the video series “MAKING THE SWITCH FROM UNITY TO UNREAL ENGINE 4” located here:
You clearly see the tutor importing a .fbx file and getting three distinct staticmesh assets in the UE content folder.
However, in Unity, you would get *one *prefab asset (with three meshes inside of it).
That’s a huge, huge difference between Unity and Unreal, which just gets glossed over in this video, and even though there’s a separate prefab video, it still seems to miss one thing:
Aren’t you losing the inherent hierarchy in the .fbx file by splitting everything up?
How do you get the entire assembly into different levels correctly positioned in Unreal?
This is done automatically in Unity, while I feel like I’m missing a big puzzle piece currently in the Unreal workflow…
I’ve not seen this video specifically and in fact that is made by another team and not our Learning Resource team, however, I can probably help clear up any confusion and answer some of these questions.
Quite simply, yes. Using the standard import options, you have two choices there. 1 is to import the mesh with the option “combine meshes” (or something like that, I don’t have the editor up in front of me and I can’t recall the exact checkbox name). When this is disabled, each different mesh ID in the FBX hierarchy is imported as its own Static Mesh asset. 2 is to enable “combine meshes” which does just as it implies. The different mesh IDs that make up the hierarchy are combined into a single Static Mesh. The problem there is that you lose the ability to edit or manipulate any individual meshes in that hierarchy.
I’m not overly familiar with Unity but the closest we have to a prefab is our Blueprints. There is another import option that I think more closely resembles this functionality you describe above which is the Import Into Level option. With this, you can import your static mesh and choose between a couple of different options. One of those is to import it as a Blueprint and place it in the level. When choosing to import it and create the Blueprint, the objects hierarchy will be maintained in the Blueprint content panel. Each piece will be an individual Static Mesh, just like Option 1 described above, but it’ll be in the BP and manageable while being imported just as it was in your modeling application.
Lastly, Another option to consider is the Unreal Studio plugin for Datasmith. It’s an option that is ideal for our Enterprise customers, but can also benefit others as well.
I hope this helps in the interim. Once we return work in the new year, I’ll pass this feedback along to the team.
I was just about to ask about instanced meshes too, which .fbx supports, and I guess the “import into level” is the answer there, and then you have to convert everything to a blueprint… (though I personally haven’t figured out yet how to keep hierarchy/transforms of multiple objects/instances when doing so).
A huge, huge thing I just discovered that the video also doesn’t mention:
Unlike Unity, Unreal doesn’t automatically handle instanced meshes in .FBX!
I had to purchase a marketplace asset to automatically create instanced meshes from my imports, which were already instanced in my 3D software (and which Unity automatically “batch”).