Need an FBX file from Maya with multiple LODs that imports correctly into Unreal

mbehensky
Mon, 16 May 2016 16:41:37 +0000
Asset Creation

Hi, everyone-

I’m trying to get LODs to work with a large scene with hundreds of objects exported as an FBX file from blender. I don’t want to sign up for the Simplygon SDK license, so I’m trying to use the Simplygon Cloud service instead. Simplygon cloud happily takes my scene, and generates as many LODs as I want in an fbx file. Each LOD has the base name of the object with _LOD1, _LOD2, etc. appended. However, when I try to import the fbx it creates a separate static mesh for each LOD of each object, whether or not the “Import LODs” checkbox is checked.

The same thing happens if I try an FBX with only one object and multiple LODs generated by Simplygon cloud.

The FBX SDK documentation talks about a way of creating LOD groups, and I think this must be what Maya does, since it is documented to work to export an FBX file with LODs from Maya into unreal.

I have sucessfully manually added the Simplygon generated LODs into unreal, but this will take days to do for my scene, will be error prone, and will have to be re-done if the scene is edited.

I’m going to try and write a post-processor to stick all the _LODx meshes from Simplygon into an FBX LOD group, but it would be a huge help if I had a known good file to compare against. I don’t have a Maya license, so if someone could take a sphere or something in Maya, generate a few LODs, and export it as an FBX file that imports successfully as a single object with multiple LODs into Unreal it would be great.

Thanks, and I’ll post what I figure out here.

2 posts - 1 participant