Welcome one welcome all in this video we will be talking about static meshes and their role in the level dressing process. First of all, what are static meshes? Well, you can think of static meshes as the props that populate much of your gaming world. These can be things like benches, chairs, lamppost, buildings, that sort of thing. And I've given a demonstration up on the screen between videos right now is to what static meshes are oftentimes used for. I do have a rocking a chair placed out here, which I will talk about more in a little bit.
But you've also see in the background that I've replaced one of my geometric box brushes with a bunch of static meshes to comprise this building here. Now sometimes these static meshes may be one entire building. This particular building face is made up of a whole bunch of other static meshes that are found in the Seoul City pack. So where do you find these static meshes to populate your gaming world? Well, if you come into your content browser and select your content folder, a real handy way of finding these is to then come over to the right here where you've got this filters drop down and say I want to find all the static meshes contained within my content folder and any subfolders under it. So notice that whatever folder you have selected, it will it will then whittle down whatever static meshes exist within that folder.
So if I select the Seoul City folder, now you can see all my static meshes that exist just in my soul city folder. Note that you can click on this static mesh filter right here to toggle it on and off. When you see this little color bar to the left, it is on left clicking on it will turn it off left clicking again. We'll turn it back on. Alternatively, you can right Click on it and remove it that way as well. So after this video, you should feel comfortable enough where you can place a whole bunch of these throughout your level.
Now, I'm not going to do that, between this video and the next because that would take me many, many hours and I don't have that time available to me. But my goal here is to provide enough knowledge about working with static meshes that you feel confident and comfortable forging ahead, some things you need to know about with static meshes. Go ahead and find a static mesh share in static mesh rock, you'll be able to locate these in your Starter Content, props folder. There's the chair, and there's the rock and all I did was I dragged and dropped a copy of each of these into my level. Now if I was to right click and play from here, you'll notice something about my chair. I can run into it.
My bullets will ricochet off of it. However, this rock here is not very rock like I can shoot through it and I can pass right through it. What is going on? Well, what is happening here is that my chair has collision on it, my rock does not How can I tell this? Well, you can tell this by double clicking on a static mesh like this Static Mesh chair here in the Content Browser. And then along the top you have this green collision button, go ahead and click this and check simple collision.
And what you see this green wireframe is the collision volume that is surrounding this chair. However, if you check out our rock here, which you can double click on and check on the collision symbol collision. You will see that there is no green wireframe around our rock. So how can we apply it well, it's Come up here in this little collision option up at the top, you've got several different shapes of collision that you can include around your rock, you can can, you can include a sphere shape, capsule shape box shape, and the further you go on down the list, the more precise the collision is going to be. I'm going to choose something like ad 26 DLP simplified collision and this isn't going to be perfect to every contour of the rock, but it's pretty good. So now if I save this, and jump back in and play, I'll just right click play from here.
You will see that I will now collide with the rock as Will my projectiles. Note that you can change collision properties by channel. What do I mean by that? That means I could make it so that I pass through this rock but my projectiles would bounce off of it. I can do that by sitting simply selecting a rock mesh, and then in the Details panel I can come find the collision settings. By default, I've got collision presets set to my default.
What does it mean default collision? Well, if I go back into my Static Mesh rock, you can see I've also got some collision settings. And for every rock I currently placed in my level, my collision presets are to block all and if I click this little triangle right here, it will show me how it will react to all different kinds of collision. If my pawn tries to go through it, no, it will be blocked. If my projectile tries to go through it, nah, it will be blocked. So if I go back into my level here, I can change my collision preset to be custom.
And in doing so, I now I've access to customize my act my interactions between all These different object types. And this particular rock, I could say, pawn, which is us, I would like to be ignored when I when I try to go through that rock, where's projectiles, I want you to be blocked by that rock. So let's try this. Right click play from here. projectiles bounce, but I go right through it. Now note that you can change this here on an instance level.
By that I mean any copy I place out here, I can make it so that one rock has collision where my projectile will go through it. But my pawn will not like this one, whereas this one, my pawn will go through it, but my projectile will not let's give that a try. And of course, I spawned myself at the beginning of the level, but no big deal so that one projectile bounces. As I go through this one projectile goes through, but not my character. Okay, so know that you can change your collision presets per instance, if you customize that collision preset. Alternatively, you can also change your collision responses right here in the Static Mesh editor by customizing them from here.
So that is good to know as well. I'm just gonna save and close out of here. One more cool thing I wanted to talk about here with static meshes before we wrap this up is that you can turn any static mesh that has collision on it into a physics actor. What do I mean by that? That means that this chair right here doesn't have to stay glued to the ground. I can knock into it and bump it all around.
I can shoot it and have it react and fly off. How do we do that? Well, to demonstrate this, I'm going to select my chair, hold down alt, left click and drag out a copy this one I'm Gonna leave glued to the floor of this one. However, I've got selected and in the Details panel, I'm going to check this box that says simulate physics. That's all you got to do to make this an object that you can bump into and shoot it around. Now there are a whole lot of other properties down here that you can fiddle with, that will determine what it responds to and how it will tumble around, etc.
That's a whole nother series of videos I'm not going to cover but I'm going to right click right here, play from here to demonstrate that this one is glued to the ground. Junot not gonna move this one, I can bump into it, I can shoot it, and it will go flying off. Pretty cool. Alright guys, that is going to do it for this discussion on static meshes. At this point, you should feel free to start populating your entire level with all kinds of static meshes. Maybe you want to turn a few of them into physics actors is Well, it's up to you to decide how crazy you want to get.
You can decide to replace all of your geometric brushes along the side here with static meshes, or maybe you can do a combination some you want to replace with static meshes, maybe some you want to play some subtractive brushes into the sides to create some windows and doorways, etc. I'll leave that up to you. Anyways, that's gonna do it all for this one guys. We will see you in the next one.