From the course: Unreal: Architectural & Industrial Visualization

The Static Mesh Editor - Unreal Engine Tutorial

From the course: Unreal: Architectural & Industrial Visualization

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The Static Mesh Editor

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- [Instructor] Unreal Engine works on the basis of these different editors, essentially these modules where you can work with different facets. For example, maybe it's materials, maybe it's blueprints, or maybe it's the mesh or the asset itself. And right now what we want to take a look at very quickly is the mesh editor, and the importance of that for working with our assets within our visualization project. So if you're following along with the content that is provided in the exercise files, you'll see in this chapter 05 01 that I'm using the full data set. And if it comes in when you open up the file with everything turned on, simply go in and turn off the trim base, the walls, the window skylights, and all of these different ones that you see my little eyeball icon turned off on. That way we can actually see the assets rather than having things like the walls, or even the ceiling, which is located up at the top here, with that in the way. So simply turn that off so you can be able to see the assets a little better. And with that turned off, we just want to click on the floor main, and by doing that, we're going to see over here in the details panel, if we scroll up and down in here, we're going to find the static mesh section in here. If that's closed, just simply click that little arrow and open it up. Now, all of these different little things within the details area will open up different editors. For example, if I double-click this material right now, it'll open up the material editor. But we don't even have, that's just a default material. We don't have any materials on there. We're not concerned with that right now. What we are concerned about with, or concerned with, is the static mesh, and how we can work with things like collisions, and other things we might want to be able to see. So let's double-click on that icon. And you'll see that it's going to open up the mesh editor for us, and in here what we can do is see the mesh that we're working with. And we have access to a couple of different things. If you're ever in need to check any of the normals to make sure the normals on your asset are facing the correct way, this is where you can simply do that by clicking the normals on or off, so you can toggle the display of those. Vertex tangents as well. And, if you needed to see the vertex or the vertices within the viewport here. Another interesting thing is to be able to see the UV layout as it exists for a specific piece of model or an asset, for example, and as well the collision. By clicking on the collision toggle here to display that, we can see that Unreal has automatically generated this collision for this floor, which is fine. The rest of the them we don't have any collisions on yet because we want to be able to dial that in specifically. And the reason we want to do that is that collisions can get expensive on memory within gameplay or full interactive content for your visualization project. So we want to be able to control that. But this is where we can preview the collisions. And as well we can access things like the details on this mesh. Does it cast a shadow, and if we want collisions enabled. And of course, on the floor here, we do want them enabled. So this is the overall mesh editor that we would work with to be able to find specific information about our asset, about a mesh, and how we can start to work with other areas, like things like collisions, which we'll take a look at coming up.

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