I’m trying to import a 2.1 mln vertices mesh like this:
It does not seem to work. Unreal has spent over 3 hours on the task - and it does not seem to complete. Unity managed to load the mesh in under 2 minutes… What is going on?
Hm… It’s been 3 hours really and the same result was achieved in unity in minutes… Why does it take so long in unreal?
Specs:
Just as a by the way, you can use alt+printscreen just to capture the currently active window, rather than your whole desktop, especially useful if you use multiple screens 
Onto the issue at hand - can you please post your import settings? UE4 has the option to recalculate normals, for example. Not saying that that specifically is definitely the cause, but your settings might reveal some step the engine is performing on import which is causing it to take a long time.
You can import it into UE4 but it takes time depending on your hardware.
Following options are enabled/selected:
Ok, just ran a quick test on the default head from Mudbox after subdividing till it hit 2mil polys.
Looks like the import is triangulating the mesh, based on the Visual Studio debug output. Can you try pre-triangulating the mesh and then reimporting?
…Did that too. 
For now I’m going to wait 1 more hour and try with triangulated mesh again.
7 hours have passed already
I think the problem must be either with the project or mesh… I have decimated the same mesh to 200k vertices and the result is exactly the same.
I hadn’t seen anything specifically about UE4, but UDK/UE3 had a default limit of about 60k polys for a single mesh if I recall correctly. To be honest I’d probably consider building from source if you arent already, and then trying to debug the import process in visual studio… Alternatively you could file a bug report and attach your static mesh, see if the devs have anything further to say.
I built unreal from source, but didn’t see anything in debug output during import. I figured I’d load a multi-object file, and that kicked off a little bit… But stopped at 8 percent and a specific mesh in the file. For now I’ll just forward over the demonstration in Unity to our client… But I want to figure it all out anyway. Unity has 65k verts per mesh limit too… But it actually splits the imported file into pieces with maximum of 65k verts - shouldn’t UE do the same?
I would just like to ask what this is for? If this is for a game then you should really break down your rig into parts and import them one by one.
You could look at it like a game. A very specialized game for very special purpose. I’m gonna split it into parts.
This is output from debug
I have figured out the possible issue behind the whole debacle, and for now it has seemed to fix the problem with huge memory allocation…
The object needs to have a “normal” scale. I have noticed that my mesh was incredibly small and thought this could correlate to huge floating point precision required to describe vertices in my model. Handling floats with high precision could take up a lot of memory as far as my knowledge goes.
I have also aligned all objects to 0, 0, 0 and exported every single one of them into separate FBX files. I will attach MAXscript I have found online and modified for proper loading in UE4. It will let you export selected objects into separate files.
I am having the same issue with importing a high res mesh. Imported one with 1mil triangles and it took 45 mins to import. Could this process be made faster somehow? The mesh is used for a cinematic.
As stated before, import time may differ depending on your hardware. What is your CPU? I’m able to import a 400k poly object in 3-4 minutes with an i5 3570.
Something weird is going on. I renamed the file and imported it and it took 5 mins. But If I hit reimport on the already imported mesh, it takes 45 mins. Both files are the same. I am using a Core i7 2600 @ 3.4ghz.
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