Final Major Project - Collisions

Collisions

       Collision is something that I often tend to have issues with when it comes to building just about any environment in 3D. The reason for that is because the type of environments that I like to build are often very cluttered interiors in which there's too many overlapping objects. So because of that, I usually have to make collisions manually. 

    I make the collisions in 3Ds Max. How I do that is - I usually finish a model and then create boxes or just about any geometric shape that would go well with the overall shape, then I make sure that they cover the model nicely. Here's an example.. 

    Once that's done, what I do is rename every box or every geometric shape like this.. UCX_TheNameOfTheAsset_01_00. UCX is what makes Unreal Engine recognise the boxes or the geometric shapes as collisions once we export them from 3Ds Max and import them in Unreal. The reason we need to add the name of the asset that the collision is for after the underscore is because that's how Unreal Engine recognises what object it's for. Then because we usually build a collision by using multiple objects, in the end we usually have to add the numbers. Here's an example of that too..

    Setting collisions up in Unreal Engine once they're done is easy. All I tend to do is go to the asset properties, go to Collision Presents and change it to BlockAll using the arrow. Then, I just tick Customized Collision. What that does is make sure that Unreal Engine is using the collision that I've made, not the default simple collision that the Engine automatically creates for every asset.

Result 

Collision

 Scene

    Building collisions is usually pretty straight forward.. but there are small things that can create problems when making them. For example, sometimes if you decide to attach the collision boxes together in 3Ds Max, Unreal Engine reads them as one large object. Which turns the collision into one mesh that the character would not be able to go through, if the asset is big. I learned that the hard way..

    But for the most part, collisions are no trouble..

..for the MOST part.