UE4.26 Modeling Mode Intro

in this video i'm going to introduce modeling mode a new editor mode in unreal engine 4.26 that will give you a set of 3d modeling tools you can use directly in the world viewport so the first thing you need to do to use modeling mode is you need to turn it on because modeling mode is an experimental plugin and it's not enabled by default so to do that you go up to the edit menu plugins and type modeling in this search box and you'll see modeling tools editor mode and you just click this box to enabled it i've already done that uh and then when you do that you're going to get a pop-up asking if you want to enable a beta plug-in and you click yes and then you're going to have to restart the editor for that model for that mo editor mode to to load um there's no other plugins you need to enable just just that modeling tools editor mode plugin so once you've done that and restarted the editor then when you click on this modes drop down you'll see that there's a new mode modeling you might have some other modes in here if you've enabled other things but modeling mode is the one we're going to use in this tutorial so if i switch to modeling mode you'll see that on the left side here in the panel there's there's currently nothing and you'll see why and then we get this toolbar and with a bunch of tabs and so now i can explain what modeling mode does which is it does a lot of things uh you know we have tools for primitives we have tools for doing things like drawing and extruding polygons and cutting them and doing booleans and some some sort of voxely operations there's tools for doing things like editing the pivot or baking transforms into a into a static mesh there's sculpt 3d sculpting tools plain cutting you know offset surfaces smoothing displacement space deformations um this is a bunch of poly modeling related stuff i'll get into a little bit triangle processing tools like simplification and remeshing uv tools some basic uv tools tools for setting normals and tangents some tools for converting between meshes and volumes and bsp and some physics collision authoring tools uh and even a few tools for manipulating uh new hair features which we're not gonna get into and these are just sort of incidentally in this mode right now uh so uh clearly there's way too much here to go over in a reasonable length video so what i'm going to do in this tutorial is i'm going to show you uh the basics of operating modeling mode and how the sort of overall tools work and in future videos i'll dive into individual tools so the main thing to understand about modeling mode is it is for editing static mesh assets so uh you know unreal the static meshes are sort of your main non-animated meshes in unreal if you've used unreal before there's things like bsps so this is not for something like bsp this is for editing static mesh assets so um you know when i have static meshes in my scene i just put a few in here we'll see the different tools will activate depending on what's selected so if i clear my selection you see a lot of these tools are grayed out because they can't do anything right now the ones that are still enabled are tools that create new new static meshes you know if i select this bunny and now i can sculpt it there's a bit of 3d sculpting if i select two things then some tools no longer work but some do so it really depends on the tools but that's the main thing is that it's for static meshes and that's going to come up a bunch of times in this video so uh basically these buttons each correspond to what we think of as tools so when you click one of those buttons you you enter a tool and then you exit the tool in some way or another so if i start the box primitive tool now i can place boxes i'll show that in a little bit when i'm done i click complete and i exit the tool um and then there's other kinds of tools actually let's go back into the box tool so basically once i'm in a tool i get a panel over here with settings there's a little bit of help text at the top and usually there's some in viewport interaction involved some tools you just change properties and you'll see a preview of some operation in the viewport and but many of the tools have some kind of you know pointy clicky interaction here in the viewport so i've got this box i can place it on things right you can see i could drop a box on my character here if i change this uh target surface i can put it on the ground plane only i can change the height maybe make it taller so uh that's basically the panel affects what happens with the tool in the viewport i'm not going to go through even all of these options and just this tool you're that's going to be a recurring theme as there's been lots of options in each of these tools but i am going to create a new box so we can just see what happens right so if i click that places a new box in the scene or in the level so what you see now is that uh if you notice it happening is down here a new box was created so it's named box and it's got this randomly generated string after i'll talk about that a little bit um the the main thing here is this is a this is this is a normal static mesh asset you see over here it's the static mesh component this is the staticmesh actor we can open this up in the static mesh editor you right click or double click just like any other static mesh you've imported so um that's that's uh basically the critical thing is that these are static meshes just like any other static mesh and unreal so i can also just drag in more instances right and then i can go here i'm going to go uh just use a simple editing tool here i'm going to move this right i'm going to click ok and you're going to see that it affected all of them because those are all instances of this static mesh right i just drag this one in three times so uh that's one of the first things to wrap your head around is that although i'm working in the viewport on an instance i'm editing the underlying asset in most of these tools there are a few tools that work on the instances but in general the tools are actually working on the asset it's a little unusual to do that here in the main viewport instead of this in the static mesh editor but the reason for that is that we can edit in context so that i can make changes relative to what i see around it and not in isolation which is what you would get in the static mesh editor so just going to mention one one got one sort of gotcha with that with those with the tools in that respect is that it's pretty common to use historically in unreal to use these default static meshes right if you have a place actors tab you've got like a default sphere right and i can drag that in and use that as a sphere in my game if i want spheres i can resize it if you use these tools on that sphere like say i go back in here into the sculpting and i do a bit of sculpting on this sphere let's use the other one right i do some edit like this it's a dynamic mesh sculpt it's pretty cool and i click accept here i'll talk about accept in a little bit now if i drag in another sphere you see it's already edited because i changed this underlying sphere asset this sphere does correspond to an asset you can always get to the asset in the content browser by right clicking and going browse to asset or control b shortcut i use it all the time you see that you know it's somewhere here in engine content it comes with all unreal games there's a set of these default primitives and you see we've edited that one so i'm going to undo that edit and it goes back you see undo and redo apply to the assets as we change them and i can click back here in the content browser to get back there so that's just important thing to note these it's a little risky to mess around with these built-in assets it only affects your project but it does affect that underlying asset uh okay so let's talk about let's get rid of these extra ones and i'll just just play with this one just so you know the f key focuses on when you select something is focused on the selection that's really useful in modeling mode and also you might notice that i'm kind of orbiting around the object the sort of standard right camera controls in unreal are sort of first person controls where you hold right mouse and use wasd but also if you hold down the alt key and use your mouse buttons you can do maya style camera controls which is a lot pretty often a lot more useful in when you're modeling a specific object okay but let's talk about accept cancel because that's also a little bit different than dcc tools you might be familiar with so here i'm going to start the plane cut tool and now i get a plane i can apply to this object right and i have these accept and cancel buttons so this is an operation that's kind of in progress i'm working actually on a preview of that object and click cancel and it just goes away right and if i click accept then it's going to bake it into the asset you see now down here the the preview changed um and the asset is modified uh you know so that kind of makes sense because that's a kind of atomic operation but it also works that way for something like sculpting so i did that a bit of sculpting before you know if i make multiple sculpt strokes here when i'm inside the tool i can undo and redo those strokes but if i want to apply this operation it's not being applied right now to my asset it's being applied actually sort of on like a preview that only exists inside the tool so if i click accept here now it's updated the asset the screenshot angle is not great there but you can see kind of that it's there right um and now if i undo i can only undo and redo the entire change so that's something to keep in mind when you're working if you've done like a lot of sculpting on something it can be good to just accept and restart the tool every once in a while to kind of save a checkpoint um that's a just a current limitation of these tools is that they work this way and something we're looking into but that's how it works right now okay so i just got rid of that so one thing you'll notice is that there's as i go back to my modeling mode tab here there's this panel down here modeling mode quick settings and these are super critical that the only thing that's always in this panel um and i'm going to explain why because because these tools make and edit assets there is an aspect of managing those assets that is different than normal dcc tools where you would have like a scene file and everything's just part of the scene right unreal you have levels but levels don't really have anything in them they just have references to content and so when you want to make a new mesh you're making new content and the level that has a reference to it but the content is a separate file and so there's some aspect of having to manage those files so um for example i'll show you a uh one one sort of artifact of that is if i make a new box here so let's let's make a different primitive i'll make a cone um if i make a cone i place that cone now if i undo the cone is gonna go away in the scene but the asset doesn't go away we never delete assets automatically we feel that that's very dangerous because it might not be what someone's expecting to lose the actual asset file because we can't recover that so undo and redo will affect changes but they won't affect new assets being created so that's uh just one thing to know um in the same sense we have to put that somewhere so you'll see here i've got generated asset settings the location is set to current folder so that means when i create a new asset it's going to place it in this folder that's what's been happening that's actually not the default i set it to that and i that's my preference when i'm using modeling tools i like modeling mode i basically tend to keep in mind a current folder and i work in that folder but if you're working on a big game project there might be certain locations you want things to go or need to have to have things go so we have some other options one is auto generated folder world relative if i switch to that you'll see that when i create say new arrow primitive it's going to create this underscore generated folder and the asset's going to go in there in a subfolder with my name and then it's going to here's so now here's the actual asset with this auto-generated uh string underneath and you can control all three of those things so if i go back to the top if i click on this little gear here you can configure uh the name of that auto-generated folder so it's hard underscore generated you can change that you can change whether or not it stores in a per user subfolder and whether or not it appends that random string so those are useful this option here is a kind of fallback for the for the other mode i'll show you which is autogen folder oh sorry um so global i picked the wrong one here global always goes in the top level folder so that is what i just did because my level is also in the top level folder so if well disk's no good you can't see a thing so that's also when it's in global it's going to be the same folder but if i make it world relative and say i have my worlds organized into subfolders like i go here sample map folder i've got this other map uh oh this brought up an interesting thing which is saving um so this is something i meant to show you later but let's just talk about it right now before i talk about uh this autogen folder is that the assets you need to you need to save them and if you don't save them you'll get these dialogues when you go to exit and real i'm sure you're familiar with these um this basically you need to keep this in mind that when you close the editor if you haven't saved those assets they're not going to be saved or if you haven't saved changes so i'm just going to save everything now so we can switch here and come back so now i went to this other map if i go back to modeling mode create a cylinder i've got this set to world relative now it's going to create a new generated folder next to my map so that's what world relative means and so if you have lots of maps and you want to keep the assets separate for each map that's a good option okay so let's complete that and go back to our other map and talk about the saving options i'm not going to save that stuff okay so back to modeling mode you'll get used to the hotkey okay so those are the location options and also there's the save mode option so manual save when i'm in manual save mode when i create a new asset uh it's going to be initially unsaved oh i want to change this back to current right so current folder there we go right so um there's my box asset you see it's got a star it hasn't been saved yet at all i can also make things to auto save new assets so that when i create a new thing it will initially be saved so if i do that let's make a taurus right now it started out as saved however if i go to edit it if i go back to my sculpt tools here and accept that it becomes unsaved and so there's no auto save everything option you have to explicitly save those either by like right clicking and saving or saving the level uh and then there's a third option which is interactive which if you use interactive mode um let's make another arrow uh is going to pop up a dialog each time allowing you to select a location and name for that asset and it will initially save it so this is the kind of safest most this is where you have to organize everything upfront mode okay oh right i guess so and if you click cancel it won't save it um i'm going to switch this back to manual save and current folder those are the options i tend to use um okay so i'm going to delete this guy get these out of here so that's that's basically the sort of different options we're saving and i'm just going to remind you again a second time this browse to asset command because sometimes like you might have actually noticed a minute ago i placed a box and it didn't appear in the browser down here that's because it was placed in this other folder so if i had been here and that box didn't appear where i was expecting i can just right click and go browse to asset and it'll jump to that folder where that asset is and let me figure out what to do with it maybe i want to move it somewhere else that sort of thing and just again right i made all these new assets now when i go to switch maps right i have to decide what to do with those um i tend to if i have this come up cancel and and go and back into that content browser and look to see what things are where and why they're why i haven't saved everything um it is a way when you leave it in manual save to get rid of like sort of temporary assets if you leave them unsaved but you do have to be careful okay so uh that's all i'm going to say about the asset management i i know that was kind of long but that's one of the biggest things to keep in mind when you're using modeling mode because it's really unfortunate if you lose work and we don't want that to happen um okay so now in terms of using tools i showed you uh accept and cancel um there's some other things that happen when using the tool so one of the things that you'll see popping up that we found that sometimes people are surprised by um is uh is the we call it the b shader so the modeling tools a lot of things in unreal kind of happen on the editor happen on the game thread and tend to kind of freeze up the editor while they're computing um this is a tool that merges objects using a kind of voxel techniques um but i'm just using it to show you something which is what we call we have this sort of preview shader that happens uh let's see if i can get it to show up it has to take long enough so you see now this means it's computing you can't accept well it's happening um but also the editor's interactive well that's happening so while that long commute is running i can still change parameters and cancel also i can cancel out and just get out of there so that's something to keep in mind is that we generally don't freeze up the editor so it's it's kind of safe to try large values and you can always cancel if something is taking too long uh okay um here let's put this box back in here and just talk about booleans for a second so a few really common tools that have uh an interaction that's relevant uh in terms of this asset question uh are tools like the boolean so um we do we have mesh booleans they're quite nice and you can you know while the mesh boolean is active even manipulate the input primitives change here you could change it to an intersection or a subtraction that kind of thing um but the other thing you can do here is you can control the output so by default when i'm doing this boolean operation it'll write to a new asset so if i click accept here it's going to create a new bunny right that's got that chunk taken out of it and it also deleted the input assets that was the setting in the tool i'm going to undo that so we can just see that again if i do that boolean you see the settings here where a new asset output name was a boolean underscore and it delete sources you could also have it hide the sources keep the sources um and but you what you can also do is control um if you want to write to one of the existing assets so um there we could do something like update the input asset and it's not going to create a new asset i don't actually want to mess up my bunny here let's maybe do that on say a box and a and this guy and i'm going to do that boolean all right it's very dark intersect you see we did the intersection if i say i'm gonna update the first input asset and accept now i've just you know changed my cone and now i've got this cone segment um so that's really useful uh you'll find out if you start are trying to edit your blueprint actors with static meshes in them that you often don't want a new asset you want to update one of the existing ones in these tools that combine assets so you can do that with booleans and you can also do that with the combine tool i'm going to undo that delete under transform here if you want to combine two assets you get the same options new asset or update one of the first or second and delete or keep sources so this will just append the meshes together so if you want to build up an assembly of pieces you can do it that way by combining multiple times into one of into one of the input assets because if you have blueprint actors you don't want to replace those with a new static mesh actor okay and if you combine things and you want to get them apart that's also possible so here we've got this is a sort of default uh ball so there's a tool that will let us select regions we start this select tool you'll find it in multiple tabs because it's kind of a utility tool and this is like a paint triangle selection tool um so i'm just gonna i'm not gonna go into all the details here there's a lot of options but i'm gonna show you if you use this connected mode you can basically click to select sub-regions uh these are different disconnected regions and then uh there's a separate tool here or separate operation so a few of the tools i'll just mention this i guess this is a good time to mention it is that a few of the tools have kind of sub operations uh with buttons in these panels so here we've got this separate triangles operation if i click that you'll see i just got a new mesh over here and if i click accept now where did that asset go oh there it is it just didn't have a preview yet so it made a new asset with that piece right um it kept the same pivot right but now i've got two i've got that piece separated out okay so that's how you can if you import for instance a big assembly of parts and you want to separate it out uh that's one way to do it okay so let's get rid of all of this stuff okay so i showed you primitives right you can make all these different kind of basic shapes and in a little bit i'll show you some editing tools for those but we've also got a few other tools for drawing more general shapes and the one i'm going to focus on right now is the polygon tool this is a tool that i use constantly might not be obvious right away that that's the tool you want but what this tool does is it lets you draw and extrude polygons right so i'm going to undo that oh so this lets you kind of build out and block out level geometry and that kind of thing and this tool has a lot of for example snapping options and i'll show you so let's just draw some basic stuff here i'm going to draw this out you see it'll snap to right angles uh it will even snap to things like same length lines so there you see those two little ticks mean those lines are the same length uh i'm just gonna you know draw some random stuff in here so once you've drawn closed off the polygon and you move the mouse up and down to set the height and you'll see that creates a new asset so if i browse to asset on that guy there it is there's the new extrusion i created so each time we do this it's going to make a new asset um so there i was drawing on the ground actually it was drawing a little bit under the ground you see because it was on the ground plane here so i'm just going to complete this and move it up so you can move it up and hit end and that'll drop it onto the ground uh so this plane you draw on you can move it around with the controls like this um but what you can also do is you can control click on the scene to position that plane and we use this plane and gizmo in a lot of our tools and so this is a really useful interaction to know you can also do things like pick up a reference so here i've got it aligned with that face and then i can shift click and you see you can kind of see how everything shift click here maybe uh it'll stay aligned with the face with the normal of the face i picked it up on it so it's just moving it um around where at the click point so that's really useful too and there's also a lot of snapping options so for instance if i want to draw sort of extend this out here i need to draw something that's the same width which could be kind of tricky but what i can do is i can snap to points in the world so you see i can snap on the plane but i can also snap to things like world vertices and it'll project on the plane so if i start here now i'm drawing in that along that edge there effectively and i could you know maybe come over here uh and draw a little bit this way and then up here okay and now you see i'm drawing out a thing that's the same width or the same at the same height and then uh you know i said before it you you know you pull out to set the height but also you can use the scene geometry so you see when you see that red x uh it's basically using the hit point to determine the depth so if i put that my mouse over this back face here you can see that now i drew something that's basically lined up there's a bit of zed fighting even because it's this it's kind of exactly the same height if i'd been more careful before i could have drawn this top at a right angle and then these things would have exactly made it together but i uh i was a bit sloppy and so i can do that use that to draw kind of ramps and things like that it does require a bit of think of sort of planning ahead right if i want to draw a ramp here that he so that my character can run up um if i start out here i don't know exactly where to draw but if i use these points as a reference you know i can start up here and then use hit that one and now i can drag out my ramp and be able to get the points i need so there's a bit of a planning aspect right and so now i've got my little level here uh i can click play is it shallow enough yeah i can and i can just directly work on it right and if that ramp was too thick or too steep for instance i can go over to poly edit tool and you see i can click on the faces so i had that object selected that's why i can just jump into the polyetit on that object right i can select that edge i could move it in now it's too steep i can make it less steep and i can kind of iterate and things like that i could you know maybe change this um go in here and do this one so i can there's not snapping for everything so for instance these positions here i can't snap but actually you can snap these to the grid so we could use grid snapping right now it's set to 10 units so i think that's too small to to hit that exactly um but so the polyetta tool i guess we could fix this that's another thing we could do in poly edit is we could get rid of that z fighting you can use to kind of reshape these things the polyedit tool has lots of other operations that i'll go into in a minute but that's the basics of the draw polygon tool um the very very basics there's there's really a ton more in there um you know there's things like the local and global snapping uh oh there's rotation snapping i guess that's a useful thing to show which is that when you're using the gizmo it respects currently respects the grid snap so if we change this to be much larger you'll see that snap to world grid if that's on then it's going to snap to that world grid and also the draw point will snap to the world grid uh if you want rotation snapping you can hold shift while you rotate and it'll snap to 45 degree angles um can snap to lengths angles all sorts of things in here um oh the hit scene object is a good one so that's uh one other thing that's pretty useful which is that let's turn on snap to world grid uh if you turn on hit scene objects then you can use any not just vertices but any scene point so if i want to draw like a little thing that's aligned here on the ground plane right i can use the scene object hit points to make that kind of exactly hit that edge there so that's just one more thing this tool does okay so that's draw polygon we've got a few other tools like polypaths so polypath more or less works in the same way it doesn't have as many options and what it's for is drawing um open paths that get thickened into walls so basically the way it works is when you see yellow you can click again and that sets and then you switch to setting the width and then the height so that lets you draw those you sort of thicken paths you can also draw ramps and you could draw ribbons so we'd seen just a ribbon it's just going to draw kind of floating planes which you might find useful for lots of things um and then we've got poly revolve this is the sort of third third of the of the trio which lets you draw uh revolves you know so basically the way it works is you double click when you're done uh oh i guess i do that under the ground and it draws surfaces of revolution um it can also you turn on the sharp normals option uh that's pretty useful to get kind of hard edges so polyrevolve works different the other the other two that automatically output a new primitive when you're done drawing in that it's an accept cancel tool so you can change the settings here i can like dial this in so i get just sharp creases in some places and there's lots of other options you can make it inside out you know you can control if you open this advanced display you can see you can control control all sorts of things um how how the mesh gets triangulated and things like that and you can use you can do also do partial uh partial revolves and things like that so this is actually quite a powerful tool um okay so that's the sort of basic poly tools so one thing i just want to note right i drew these things and i can just run on them right away that's because they're configured to have complex collisions so if i go into the static mesh editor on this asset there's a section in here of collision options and you'll see that the collision preset gets set to block all which is not the default so you see that's why there's a reset to default arrow so when we make new primitives new shapes new primitives our new extrudes and new stuff we generally automatically set it to block all collision preset and use complex collision is simple this is expensive and it's not what you'd probably want to use in your final game you probably want to author custom collision uh but um i just want to mention that uh that that's the default is that's how we configure things it's not something that's an option right now that you can control uh and then you know of course one thing that often comes up is like you don't necessarily want all these pieces um so you can use that combine tool so here i'll do this into the first one i selected um so now those two pieces get merged together and you can still go and edit them with the polyetta tool like they're separate pieces but it allows you to kind of merge stuff and keep uh put things together okay so that's the poly or that's the uh that's the poly modeling now you will notice i'm when i'm in poly edit uh you know sometimes you see that the faces are triangulated so this is a non-planar polygon so uh and in fact i just said the word polygon but that's actually not technically correct here these aren't polygons um they are poly groups and that's the last uh sort of main thing i want to talk about so that you can understand how these these tools work so if i go back to the box tool um let's just reset this uh and let's set this to like to say let's just do three on each face so now if i make this box see if i go to wireframe if you can kind of see it's got it's got different faces and i'm going to make another one i'm going to change this to per quad oh look at that they're snapping together because of the snap settings um okay so now they look the same but these two have uh oh okay let's put that back down let's uh uh so they are the same mesh they're the same triangles uh and actually there's a tool you just it might be useful to know this inspector tool will let you just see in the viewport a lot of stuff about your mesh right so these two have the same triangles but they have different poly groups so if i go into the polyedit tool see that this one i'm selecting the big faces like on a cube whereas in this tool i'm selecting quads so why what's the so the difference isn't something you can see unfortunately in the main viewport you have to start up uh one of the tools that will show you the polygroup so right now the easiest way to do that is to start this select tool that's the brush select tool i showed you before if you remember for painting triangles and you can change this face color mode to by group you see here we see we've got like different color on each face and if we go to this one by group you see that we've got um a different color on each quad so the the groups are group the poly groups are groups of triangles and then our tools uh like polyedit our poly tools work on those groups um and so they find edges between groups and they find vertices at corners of groups so they don't work on the triangles and they don't exactly work on polygons we the polygons are kind of implicitly defined and that lets you do some interesting stuff um like so you can author the that's like the smaller you can in this selection tool also assign new groups so if we go create polygroup now we just created a new one see now we've got a polygon with a hole in it but if we go back to polyedit that's fine it can still work that way so we can work on this outside face or this inside face it doesn't cause any problems like it might in normal poly modeling software and in fact we can kind of have arbitrarily complex poly groups so in fact this bunny most likely has uh yeah because we subtracted so the polygroups come with boolean so because we subtracted a sort of stretched out cube we've got some faces in here some poly faces but also we have one face for this whole bunny and we can go back into like the select tool you know and maybe create a polygroup there and now we go to polyedit now that's a separate polyface and we can select that and move it independently and you see we do i'm not going to get into this in this video but when you're editing a more complex face right when you're editing a simple face like this uh well actually even a simple face like this we are trying to find a a good def like kind of soft deformation of the surrounds so if you see the meshes like smoothly deforming rather than just rigidly moving that face but when you're on a simpler shape like something like this uh you know it is going to basically become a rigid movement like you're used to if you have a very low poly input shape like you would in a poly modeler so that's kind of interesting um and then the poly edit tool has a lot of operations in it uh these sub operations so you can do stuff like okay we're going to extrude this polyface um and maybe uh let's see inset it we can do a bit of an inset and then we can extrude some more so we can build that sort of arbitrarily complex shapes uh using these tools um you know i can i don't know i'm not myself actually very good at this kind of thing extrude but you can build up these kind of structured models using polygroups and quite a few of the other tools can use the polygroup so for instance the uv tools can operate you can basically solve for uvs based on polygroups so i can actually i can probably even show you that maybe it's not let's not get into that right now um but based on those on painted polygroups for instance i can i can do uvs on this bunny and that kind of thing i'll that'll be a topic for a future video um okay so uh one other thing i'll show you because if you import models they aren't going to have polygroup so i'm going to jump to the third person example map i'm not going to save any of this so and this is as i was mentioning before this can be quite extreme you might end up with a lot of unsaved assets and you know you can just save all you can be more careful i don't want to keep any of this so i'm going to not save any of it so here's an example where this is the sort of default level right if i start polyedit on this shape it doesn't have any polyfaces because this is these are default static meshes imported from something else that we don't know about their faces but we do have this polygroups tool which will let you configure the polyfaces based on basically trying to find regions that aren't don't deviate too much from each other so once i do that and then go back to polyetit i can you know make start more structured edits to those shapes this is a weird lighting artifact i think if i rebuild lighting this goes away um and uh one thing i will say is that that might seem like a oh it's wrong bunny let's use this bunny you know that tool doesn't do a great job on something like this we can turn up this setting and you see it kind of groups faces but it's not magic so it it kind of goes off of sharp edges only so that's the kind of best way to to use it um okay so that's uh polygroups if you do want to edit like directly edit the triangles of something like if you have um like for instance a mesh like this and you just wanted to tweak like one little vertex here we also have try edit which is basically a very similar tool you can select faces and edges and triangles and i can just you know tweak this triangle a little bit and we have some different operations over here where you can do things like if i need one more vertex i could poke that face um so these are very low level edits but you might find especially working on really low poly uh game meshes where it's not it's not like a structured quad meshes input that the try edit tool um will help you and these operations here are they're similar to uh the sculpting and that like if i do a bunch of operations i can undo them inside the tool but i have to accept to kind of commit it and once i accept i can only undo or redo the whole sequence of operations there's no there's currently no history stored for operations inside a tool okay so i'm just go back to my map to show you a few general purpose utility tools and that's going to be the end don't save so so remember i didn't save anything in this map before so the maps contents was lost i do still have all the pieces down here but you would definitely want to if you're working you make sure you save your map and and the assets that you want to hang on to of this sort of temporary assets you may be building while you're working and as i said before the safest thing to do is save them all and then you can go back and delete things you don't need um once you know that they're on they're on reference because if they're referenced in the level and you try to delete them the editor will warn you and say you have to force delete it and if you see that that's the sort of danger zone you want to think am i sure i want to force delete this okay i'm just going to mention one a particular toolbar up here which is kind of general purpose utility tools so let's let's just make a couple of primitives here make a cylinder which is under this transform tab so a lot of these tools are kind of specific to different kinds of mesh editing that you may or may not need to do but the transform tab is extremely common to sort of switch to i've used it all the time for these few operations that it has so one i showed you combine already so that that lets you basically append static meshes together into a new static mesh very quickly it's not the same as when you right click and do merge actors if you might have used that before that's a much more intensive combined that's really this is really just for combining the triangles of the mesh the geometry and when you're building up these you know things out of pieces it's really useful uh the other thing is duplicate so duplicate if you you know say i've got my bunny here and i want to you know mess around with it uh but i don't want to necessarily lose it and i don't want to you know i want to mess around on a copy basically so if i do a normal like editor copy where i'll alt drag or something i just made an instance so that we'll have the same problem we had this here before where if i edit this one it's going to affect this one too so if i want a new one i need to you know like i can right click down here and duplicate but that just duplicates the asset in the down here and i often i want one like in the scene at the same place kind of thing so what i can do is the duplicate tool and that will let me make a copy and by default it's just going to append a number here i can give it a new name if i want to and then i've got options like delete the source keep the source hide the source so if i just wanted to work on a new copy in the same location i would delete the source and you see now down to my content browser i got my original bunny and i've got a copy bunny and this asset here is referencing the copy now so if i do something with this one like you know sculptor on it a little bit i've still got my original there um so i can test it out and also i don't you you may or may not know about this but uh you know i can always go back over here and switch this back to my original so i can you know create copies work on them in place and then switch back to the original one if i decide i didn't like my changes okay so that's the that's the duplicate tool which you'll find really useful as you're working um a few other ones in here there's a line so if i have multiple objects and i want to like put them you know next to each other that are like in the same position um so a line tool you can align by pivots or by bounding boxes so the pivots on these things are at the bottom so i could align them by their pivots and i could you know align their tops and align x and y and z um oh that this box position only affects when you're using bounding boxes right so that's aligning the tops their tops and i can pick which axes i align on here i think you know i can switch only x or y or z so this is really useful if you want to like center things on top of each other and that kind of thing um another thing i can do is edit pivot so if i created this cylinder um i guess i'll show you this we also have this transform tool which just lets you do a few things like you can use a gizmo to move things around the modeling mode gizmo versus the default gizmo um but you can also do this snapdragon thing and then you can kind of click oh does not seem to be working okay i'm gonna have to look more into that in a second oh there it is right you have to click on the source object and not the gizmo but basically that what it does is i can click some point on here and now i'm positioning that point on the scene and i can control whether or not it gets aligned with the normal and things like that but sometimes when you're doing that you might like actually that got flipped over now right um you might want to have the pivot be somewhere else uh on a on a mesh like this so for instance i might want the pivot to be centered so the edit pivot tool will let you move that pivot around either by using the gizmo right or i can switch to snap dragging and i can position that pivot oh i made a copy i did a classic thing on unreal which is that i alt dragged as i was doing this all tumbling that's the thing that happens a lot when you use the alt camera keys so i can position it on the surface somewhere or i can use these buttons if i turn off snapdragon i can you know position it in different locations on the bounding box um so that can be really useful but one thing to note is that it is updating the asset so there has there are other there's a way to manipulate the pivot temporarily in unreal but this changes the pivot permanently so just to be clear about what that means is that um right if i got this one up here let's drop that guy down on top of this cube so these are now instances of each other so if i edit the pivot on one um maybe make it at the top when you accept this tool it's going to automatically move it's going to move the pivots it's going to edit the mesh so it's going to keep this one in the same spot but the one over here it's it's not going to keep in the same spot right because it's pivot now stayed in world position but in relative position it was moved so that's just something to note about the edit pivot it's a good thing to use up front to kind of set up your asset but if you use it on something you've got a bunch of instances of it won't keep their current locations currently and it's very hard for us to do that because it might be in multiple levels even you might have the same asset which aren't loaded so we can't really update all instant all uses of an asset like that and finally the other thing you can do is bake a transform so for instance um you know maybe i have this thing rotated and i want to put the pivot at the bottom and keep it in this orientation um so one thing i can do there and maybe i want to non-uniformly scale it so a lot of you know maybe that non-uniform scaling can be a big problem in unreal so what i can do now is i can bake the transform on this so i can i have some options i can make the rotation or not make the rotation and i can also bake all the scale or just the non-uniform scale so let's just bake them on uniform you see over here my scale is 0.2511 so if i bake the non-uniform scale i'm not going to make the rotation and i accept now you see that my scale is now back to 1 1 1 because i got rid of the non-uniform um and i kept the pivot in the same location and everything like that i could also you know bake the rotation and bake the whole scale i guess there's no scale now so let's let's make it bigger and maybe just do that a little bit more so we can see so if we bake the rotation and scale um then uh now the object's pivot is sort of aligned to the world uh you see it's got no more rotation it's got no more scale so we've edited this mesh right if we go into static mesh editor it's now this shape it's not a scaled or translated or rotated version of a cylinder it's this deformed shape um okay so let's close that so that can be useful for lots of reasons if you've done lots of non-uniform scaling of to kind of move things around and you're happy and now you want to kind of turn that into geometry that's safe to use like for instance some advanced rendering features and physics features don't work with non-uniform scale so that's a really critical capability okay so that's the tools in this panel and that's basically the end of this tutorial so uh you know i didn't really go into what all these different tools do there's so much stuff in here so if you watch this video and you ha and you have questions like it can i do is it possible to do a certain kind of thing please post in the comments and i will answer try to answer those questions and it'll give me a sense of what to cover uh in future videos so that's the end of this video thanks for watching and please try out modeling mode and tell us what you think okay thanks

Channel: Ryan Schmidt

Views: 5,667

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Id: Z11EqYl14nM

Length: 49min 36sec (2976 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020