From the course: Unreal Engine 5 Essential Training

Using the Static Mesh Editor - Unreal Engine Tutorial

From the course: Unreal Engine 5 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Using the Static Mesh Editor

“

We have a number of different types of geometry that we can work with in Unreal Engine, probably the most common of which is a static mesh. Now that's just basically a polygonal object, and that can be placed in memory and rendered by the graphics card. And this allows those objects to be rendered very efficiently. Now static meshes are what you'll use for most objects. Now as you import objects into Unreal Engine, they will come in generally as a static mesh, and you can edit them using the static mesh editor. So let's take a look at that. I'm going to select this patio chair and let's go into the static mesh editor. Now there's a number of different ways to do that. You can go into the outliner, right-click, select edit, and then the name of the object or hit "Ctrl + E". And that will bring you into what's called the static mesh editor. Another way to do that is to go into the details panel. If you scroll down, you'll see we have a static mesh. And we can just double-click on that static mesh and it will come up. And then one more place to do it is to go into the actual content browser. And I'm going into my cabin scene here under static meshes. And here's that patio chair. And again, you can just double-click on it to activate the static mesh editor. Now this just allows you to do a number of things with the mesh that can be very handy in Unreal Engine. One thing you can do is you can actually navigate in this viewport here. And this is very similar to the viewport you find in Unreal Engine. And you can zoom in on your object if you want. One of the most important things you can do is you can add in things such as collisions. So if I were to use this pull-down I can create, say for example, a capsule-simplified collision and that will give me a collision so that if things run into this object or basically violate this collision volume, then something will happen. And so either they'll bounce off of it or the chair will move or whatever. And then we can also work with the UVs that are attached to the object. And we can change the UVs in the static mesh editor. Over here on the right, we have a details panel that allows us to go into detail on this particular mesh. One is the materials that are applied to this object. We also have settings for nanite and we'll get into that in just a little bit. We also can control what's called level of detail. And that changes the geometry as it gets further or closer to the camera. We can also change things, such as how it handles light maps, as well as whether or not the geometry is double-sided or not. And then also some stuff that has to do with collision and ray tracing. So there's a lot of things in this static mesh editor. Now by default, you probably won't be using this much, but as we work through some of these lessons, you will be using this in the future.

Contents