Why is bringing static meshes into the scene so slow?

Hello,

I am looking for reasons why dragging static mesh actors into the scene from the content browser is sooo slow. What happens during this process? What can I do to make it faster?

As soon as I have the time I will perform some tests myself to learn more about this, only now I hope to get some quick pointers that may help me in the current situation.

Background:

static meshes come from FBX files that I imported into UE
there is only the mesh in the FBX file, no lights, not materials, no cameras…
some are very complex, yes, (400mB, ) but maybe this is not the main issue ?

import settings were:

Importing takes quite long as well. This I have played with a bit and what I found for this step is:

  • NOT building the adjacency buffer did not speed things up for me as suggested in other posts, only the file size went down some 35%
  • setting the static mesh LODGroup to ‘none’ severely reduced the import time (obviously)
  • importing the same FBX in a lower poly version made things faster, but it’s a trade-off of course.

I assume that bringing the FBX as imported with the optimizations listed here into the scene from the content browser will be faster, but I have not had the chance to scientifically test this.

Thanks

I believe that it just won’t simply import the mesh, it’ll do a lot of optmiziations, but one thing that I don’t know it might be related is the creation of collision. That might take quite some time too.

Hi Iotti

Thanks for your input.

Do you mean the engine might create collision information when a mesh is pulled into the scene?
I did switch off ‘auto generate collision’ when i imported the fbx files so i’d assume collision would not be a significant factor. I’ll include this in my tests later though.

I return with news :slight_smile:

I have now been able to bring a very large heap of highly detailed static mesh actors into the scene from the content browser within seconds. I have not identified the exact reason for why this process was so very slow in my earlier attempts, but it must be among these:

  1. My project now lives on an SSD, before it was on a normal hdd.
  2. the DDC is now on the SSD as well, before it was on a normal hdd.
  3. all fbx files were now imported into the content browser using the PC that actually houses the project, and then brought into the scene. Previously I had imported the files into UE on multiple PCs and migrated them to the main project to, as I had hoped then, speed up the process.

My guess would be that bringing actors into the scene that were migrated from a different project/PC requires the engine to update it’s DDC at this point, which makes it so slow.