Prop Popping up Close (Possibly Physics Asset Related?)

Howdy, i’ve got a [largish prop][1] of a railroad switch which disappears if the camera gets in certain spots. I have the object origin being the ground between the two rails at the head of the switch to make placing the prop properly much easier, but that means that the engine derenders the mesh if the camera gets around certain spots, mostly if you get up real close with the tail end of the rails, which is a real bugger for placing rails, and for doing between the rails shots in cut scenes.

I’m sure it’s in there somewhere, but a little digging in the documentation didn’t really mention anything about what the engine uses for deciding on prop pop, my first inclination was to make the physics object a little bigger to expand the bounding box but that didnt’ seem to do the trick, It’s not a huge issue, but one that i’d prefer solved.

Also while i have people’s attention, since i don’t need the switch to be seen moving, but want the switch to be open or closed statically, instead of rigging the blades and lever tower with bones, i did it with blendshapes, but now it always fails to import LODs, without listing a reason why in the console and about a 1/5 chance of just crashing. Unlike the last problem, this one is a bit of a bugger since the switch is 13k at top LOD but it comes down to 800 at lod3, and since there’s so many in the open it’s a huge optimization issue, so that’s something that can’t just slide by.

I’m using the most recent version of blender, no fbx related plugins

http://puu.sh/kTIBe/aa5bf8ee2d.png

any help is appreciated

Physics bodies are taken into consideration for culling and lighting skeletal meshes so you need to make the the bodies in Phat are covering the whole mesh. If you still see culling after that increase the bounds scale of the mesh in its details panel. I dont have an answer for your second issue unfortunately.