July 2009
Intermediate to advanced
912 pages
23h
English
Play a game built with the Unreal Engine, and one thing jumps right out at you: the amazingly rich visual detail. Static meshes make that rich visual detail possible. You don’t create these polygon models within Unreal Engine: You do that in exterior applications such as 3ds Max, Maya, and Photoshop. In this chapter, we show you exactly how static meshes work, how to create them, and how to import them into your levels.
Static meshes are drawn by the computer’s graphics card, allowing them to be rendered much more quickly than BSP brushes (see FIGURE 5.1). Because they never change position, they can be cached to video memory. This means that multiple copies of a single ...
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