Workflow for complex/modular level - fbx import or within UE4?

Development Asset Creation
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1

I think my question can best be expressed by referring to the ‘Mobile Temple’ demo content.

There are many instances of a ‘pillar’ or a ‘window’ that are only the same asset being used multiple times…as you’d expect in an efficient workflow for obvious reasons. However they appear to be placed with a precision that I can only imagine would be hard or extremely tedious to pull off ‘in editor’. It’d be more preferable to do this placement in a program like maya or max right? In those you have precision tools and arrays and so forth that allow for this sort of large scale construction.

But as I understand it UE4 doesn’t support importing levels in this way. An fbx file will either merge individual components into one single asset or you’re stuck dozens of duplicates of the same asset.

At best the only workflow I’ve found that allows for placement in an external program would be (to continue the example of the temple) to have each pillar exported as a separate asset but a) this means you lose having each asset as an instance and b) you loose the local pivot points.

The temple has neither of these problems…so what am I missing? Even if the temple is ‘hand assembled’ it is still a very small section of level. There could be thousands of pillars in a final full level right?

2

Have you looked into Vertex Snapping? That might help you place them more precisely. What I usually do is assemble everything in 3d package, put all the pivots of those meshes to 0,0,0. Import, place one mesh in the viewport. After that copy and paste in and choose next mesh from the drop down. I usually do not care too much about instancing, as I do mostly just “artsy” levels, and performance is not an issue. But if I wanted to use instanced mesh with local pivot, I would follow all the above steps, then export all the meshes that repeat as another fbx, use vertex snap to align them to the already placed “sketch”, and delete the old one. (dunno if it makes sense :slight_smile: )

3

True, I hadn’t considered vertex snapping to a ‘stand in’. I wonder if I could make use of a blueprint perhaps to replace the proxies en-masse in-editor because I’d still be a little apprehensive about replacing what could potentially amount to a lot of meshes. Sadly I lack the expertise in C++ to put together an equivalent tool.

Cheers.