Introduction
Thanks to our recently released plugins, users can now use RapidPipeline within a variety of 3D software, including Unreal Engine 5. This integration makes it possible for users to import, process and clean up their models locally, all within one software solution.
The Problem
This month’s selected model is the following car model, which upon being imported into Unreal Engine seems to have some issues.
A quick investigation reveals that the input car model has some faces that are incorrectly oriented. Usually, this is resolved by uploading the model to a 3D DCC software like Blender and flipping the faces before reimporting the model back to Unreal. As you can imagine, this is a rather time-wasting process for 3D artists.
Fortunately, our new plugin provides a much more streamlined solution.
The Solution
All our plugins, including Rapid Pipeline for Unreal, come with a number of “actions” that allow users to quickly perform various processes. These include:
Import wide range of 3d file types, including over 30 CAD formats
Decimate a model's geometry to reduce its total face count
Bake material properties
Remesh a model
Remove small and hidden parts of a model
Clean Up an Imported Mesh
Clean Up Mesh
In this example, we will focus on the “Clean Up Mesh” action. As the name suggests, this action is mainly used to quickly fix common issues that a mesh might have. It has various settings to help us do just this. These include:
Vertex Merging which removes any duplicated or unconnected vertices.
Recompute Input Normals which discards the original normals and recomputes them.
Fix Winding Order which helps correct the orientation of flipped faces
For our sample model, the goal is to correct our model’s face orientation so we will simply toggle the “Fix Winding Order” setting and run the plugin.
Just like that, the plugin corrects the face orientation issues our mesh had in just a few simple steps.
Results
With just the click of a few buttons, the plugin saves us from the time-consuming process having to manually fix a relatively common mesh issue. Our model is now ready for further use.
To have a more performance friendly mesh, we can also utilize the decimation action, which enables us to go from an 80mb model with about 1.6 million faces to a12mb model with 250k faces.
To showcase the results outside of Unreal Engine, we can use the plugin’s export action to export the file in our format of choice. You can check out the final version of the model using our interactive viewer below. The results can also be viewed in AR.
Meet the Author
Daniel
Technical 3D Artist
Daniel is a 3D and VR artist and responsible for QA at DGG. Working with leading retailers, DGG is on a mission to automate 3D asset optimization workflows for Web, mobile and XR targets - for e-commerce, and beyond. Daniel completed his studies in Expanded Realities at the Hochschule Darmstadt.
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