Thursday, May 13, 2010

Re-assembling FBX imports

At the moment I am working on a script that would allow the reassembling of the static meshes imported into UnrealED to alleviate manually reassembling of scenes created in Maya. This may also be applicable to other 3D programs that export using the FBX format.

The approach that I am currently undertaking are
  1. Importing static meshes at location 0,0,0. When a static mesh is added to the scene in the UnrealED, location 0,0,0 for the static mesh that is being add is the point at which you right click to add the static mesh. Since this point is not actually location 0,0,0 the static mesh that is added would be relative to this point. In order to correct this you must manually set the location of the added mesh to location 0,0,0. So the first purpose of the script is to move the added static mesh to location 0,0,0.
  2. Duplicating static meshes. Once I am able to successfully duplicate static meshes in script, I would then be able to create and indefinite amount of static mesh using a for loop.
  3. Create a list of static mesh locations from the selected mesh in the content browser. This list would then be used to replace the meshes that are being duplicated in the preceding for loop.

Some of the classes that would be examined to accomplish some of these features are the functions found in the Actor class for movement and relocation, StaticMeshComponent class for the replacing of static meshes in the for loop and the ThumbnailRenderer, ThumbnailManager etc for creating a list of the static mesh locations.

The current hurdle that I am facing is using the SetLocation function that is native to the Actor class on the active or currently selected static mesh actor that is being added to the scene.

1 comment:

  1. How can you use the ThumbnailRenderer or ThumbnailManager classes?? I've been trying to use them so I can use the editor thumbnails in my udk project.

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