From the course: Unreal Engine 4: Realtime Motion Graphics

Importing geometry into UE4

From the course: Unreal Engine 4: Realtime Motion Graphics

Start my 1-month free trial

Importing geometry into UE4

- [Voiceover] So now we have our project all set up with our folders and our settings, and now it's time to import our geometry. So I'm gonna go over to our geo folder. Again, we're gonna make folders for the different elements because we have a few different objects that get imported with everything and just to keep everything nice and clean. This is the way I like to do it. I highly recommend it. Okay, so first we're gonna import our bottle. So let's make a bottle folder. Open that up, import. Go to chapter three, Maya, FBX, export bottle. Okay, let's look at our options here. We want to import a skeletal, and we want to import the mesh. Again, this doesn't have a technical skeleton. But anything that's animated that has to be on. Let's open up our advanced tab here. This is all good. Preserve smoothing groups, import meshes in bones, are on. Everything else is turned off. Creates physics asset can get turned off. We don't want Unreal to compute normals, we've set up our normals properly, so import normals and tangents. We want our animations of course, so we want to click on that, and we want to uncheck import materials and textures, because we're gonna set those up manually here in Unreal. Cool, so let's import. All right, again we have this, could not find the bind pose error, it's not really an error for our purposes. You can disregard it and close this window. And we're gonna open up bottle_01 anim, and just take a look, and we can see, we have our little bottle spinning. And in our skeleton tree, you can see we have our same hierarchy as we had set up in our content creation application. Everything's cool, it's coming in fine. All right, next, let's import the panel. So I'll go, make a folder called panels. Go to import panels_lower. All of our options here. Everything should be set the same as we just did. Awesome, great, let's import it. Same little error, say go away, all good. Let's open up the panels_lower anim. And then we can see, we have our panels, awesome. All that animation, all that stuff baked into that one object. And over on our skeleton tree here, you can see we have a lot more objects on this one, because there are different meshes, and different knoles, and all these things that were put together when the asset was built, to be able to do the animation and organization properly. And that all comes in clean, as our skeleton. Everything looks good here, great. Okay, so we'll go back to our geometry folder. We're gonna make a new folder, we're gonna call this panel_cage. It's that little extra element that goes around the panels. We go to import, go to panel_cage_lower, And you can see, this one, we brought it in, and it import as skeletal isn't automatically checked now. I believe that sometimes the importer can't see that it's an animated element for some reason. So it doesn't automatically offer that option. We know it's animated, so we want to turn that on automatically. We can override what it thinks. Same settings, everything else as before. Make sure import animations is on. Click import. Again, close this error. We're gonna open up the panel_cage_lower anim. Just make sure, and there we go. We can see that the animation is in there. For some reason the importer doesn't always see it. No worries, we just tell it it's there, and it finds it. Okay, so now we are going to import the tube. So let's make a new folder, call this tube. Import tube. Again, same thing, we need to manually turn on import as skeletal. Everything else we leave as we have been doing. Import it. Disregard that, open up this, just to double check. We should just see a little vertical movement happen a little way into the sequence. Boom, done, awesome. Easy animations there. Okay, so now, let's import the rings. So, that time, everything else looks good. Import normals and tangents is on. Animations is on, excellent, import it in. All right, you could see that it took a few minutes to sort of just get up and going, because there's a little bit more going on inside that file, in terms of the amount of geometry and animation, no worries. Brought it all in, disregard this error, let's open up the rings_01_anim clip. And we can see that we have all of our rings in there. It's a little smaller here, but we can see that everything's moving around. If we look at our skeleton tree, we can see that we have all these objects in here. And that's exactly how we had it set up. All the names are all right, everything's looking good. Cool. All right, so we just have one last thing to import, which is our platform. So we'll make a folder for our platform. Open up that folder, import platform. Skeletals on, meshes on, these guys are on. Normals and tangents are on. Animations is on. Cool, import. Cool, turn this off. Open up this, just to see our little spinning platform. Cool, everything's good, we look over here. We can see all our different objects in the platform. Everything's working great. Okay, so now we've imported our six different pieces of animated geometry. Made different folders for all of them. We've checked them out in persona to see everything working. Next up, we're gonna actually bring these objects into our viewport and start assembling our scene.

Contents