Finally, a bit of a breakthrough! It had been slow going for the last few weeks, with not much progress. Working with Unreal is challenging to say the least, and even seasoned users will tell you that they still have to look up solutions to some issues they have no idea how to work around. Message boards and forums are helpful, but between spending so much time learning the basics, and then trying to find answers to my specific hurdles, I didn’t have anything to present last week for user testing, which was really disappointing for me. That said, Maria and Enrique were very supportive and understood the difficulty of working with new and complex software for what amounts to a pretty massive project.

Briefly, I had managed to get my test-project off the ground with a free model of a theater space I found on SketchFab – a 3D scan of a landmarked theater made to preserve its interior. It’s really detailed and you can tell it took a lot of work to scan it, then reconstruct and texture it in a few different applications. It’s as impressive as any model you’d have to buy on one of the many 3D model marketplaces online, but for a free asset, it’s fantastic. The problem (which I mentioned briefly in my Show-A-Thing feedback entry) is that once I imported it and placed it in my project, I could look around with my First Person Character, but couldn’t move. And I had no idea why. Message boards and forums didn’t really have any answers, and posting to the Unreal Engine subReddit got me a well-meaning but more time consuming workaround that ultimately wouldn’t help.

This week, our 50 Days of Making class ended early, so I asked James if he might have any ideas. He had previously been doing his own 50 Days working in Unreal, and producing some really nice work with particle systems. He said I was on the right track, looking at collision settings in the theater model, as that would be a likely reason why I couldn’t move. He stuck with me for the better part of a half-hour as we clicked settings on and off, and looked at static mesh components of the model I had imported as a whole, in order to place it in the project in one piece, rather than reconstructing it. A little trial and error, and I could begin to see the problem: Unreal was using huge, oversimplified collision geometry for much of the model, rather than true-to-form collisions with smaller objects. So, for example, the individual theater seats were acting as one immense block, so I couldn’t pass through rows or aisles.

I gotta say, a half-hour with him was more enlightening than the hours of tangential (albeit necessary) fundamentals courses, YouTube tutorials, and needle-in-the-haystack searches I had been spending time on. He had to break off to go to another meeting, but now I knew where to look. Armed with this, I started looking into object Collisions, and using optimal import settings for new assets. I’m happy to say I can finally move around and explore the venue space as intended. Thank you, James!