Multi-Part Mesh, Modular Pawn and Performance

I was planning on using the Modular Pawn system as described in the wiki: A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements - Epic Developer Community Forums

I was reading around and read multiple times that using this is more performance intensive than a single mesh due to draw calls being executed for every part. Is this true?

Because I was just reading about multi-part meshes from the animation documentation here: FBX Skeletal Mesh Pipeline in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation

Do they mean multi-part meshes as in the modular pawn system or something else? And does this mean, as described in the documentation, that having a modular character really doesn’t have a performance impact over a single mesh character?

Thanks for any clarification on this.

I would also like to know this.

Hello Tingle,

A modular Pawn is more performance intensive because of the draw calls that is required with this system. Think of a grouped mesh system. All of these parts make up that group but they are all individual mesh’s. Each mesh must be called to determine its position in world space. This system was created to be called in Unreal 4 engine and therefore the engine is handling the process of creating the mesh and then calling all of the mesh’s created this way.

The Multi-Part Mesh system is a system by which the mesh is created in a external modeling software and bound to a skeletal system. The system is then combined and exported from this modeling software and brought into UE4. By combining the mesh this brings the draw call to 1 because it is a singular asset.

The Modular Pawn system will be more expensive than the Multi-Part Mesh system.

I hope this helps clarify this issue and thank you for your question.