I am looking for reasons why dragging static mesh actors into the scene from the content browser is sooo slow. What happens during this process? What can I do to make it faster?
As soon as I have the time I will perform some tests myself to learn more about this, only now I hope to get some quick pointers that may help me in the current situation.
Background:
static meshes come from FBX files that I imported into UE
there is only the mesh in the FBX file, no lights, not materials, no cameras…
some are very complex, yes, (400mB, ) but maybe this is not the main issue ?
Importing takes quite long as well. This I have played with a bit and what I found for this step is:
NOT building the adjacency buffer did not speed things up for me as suggested in other posts, only the file size went down some 35%
setting the static mesh LODGroup to ‘none’ severely reduced the import time (obviously)
importing the same FBX in a lower poly version made things faster, but it’s a trade-off of course.
I assume that bringing the FBX as imported with the optimizations listed here into the scene from the content browser will be faster, but I have not had the chance to scientifically test this.
I believe that it just won’t simply import the mesh, it’ll do a lot of optmiziations, but one thing that I don’t know it might be related is the creation of collision. That might take quite some time too.
Do you mean the engine might create collision information when a mesh is pulled into the scene?
I did switch off ‘auto generate collision’ when i imported the fbx files so i’d assume collision would not be a significant factor. I’ll include this in my tests later though.
I have now been able to bring a very large heap of highly detailed static mesh actors into the scene from the content browser within seconds. I have not identified the exact reason for why this process was so very slow in my earlier attempts, but it must be among these:
My project now lives on an SSD, before it was on a normal hdd.
the DDC is now on the SSD as well, before it was on a normal hdd.
all fbx files were now imported into the content browser using the PC that actually houses the project, and then brought into the scene. Previously I had imported the files into UE on multiple PCs and migrated them to the main project to, as I had hoped then, speed up the process.
My guess would be that bringing actors into the scene that were migrated from a different project/PC requires the engine to update it’s DDC at this point, which makes it so slow.
