In this lecture, you'll learn how to import models into Unreal and how to add meshes to your Unreal map. A model is a graphical 3D asset. When we import a model into Unreal, we get a mesh and one or more materials and one or more textures. An actor is an entity that we've actually placed in an Unreal map. Let's go see how all that works. I've created a new Unreal Project called Meshes and Actors. Our goal here is to get a model imported into our project and drag it into the map. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here in the Content Browser and I'm going to add a folder here in the Content Browser. So I right-clicked and am selecting new folder and I'm going to call this folder Meshes and Actors. The reason I'm doing that is because we're going to try to follow this Unreal Engine style guide as much as possible for the naming conventions in our Unreal Engine Projects. Those naming conventions apply to folders and folder names and folder structure, as well as the asset names for the assets that we import or create in our Unreal Engine games. There's the URL magnified so that you can read it and easily type it in in book market in case you ever wonder how you should name assets as you're developing Unreal Engine games. This is really a great style guide, so we're going to try to follow this as much as possible. Now that I have my Meshes and Actors folder, I'll double-click it and I'll create another folder called Maps so I can store all the maps in my game in a single folder. I'll save this map into my New Maps folder and I'm going to call it Map0. As we build more complicated games we'll certainly call our maps' gameplay and perhaps main menu or controls menu or those kinds of things but for now, we can just call it Map0. It would be convenient if this map opened up in the editor whenever we open the editor. It's not currently configured that way though. So let's fix that by going to Edit Project Settings. On the left, I'm selecting Maps and Modes and now we're going to change each of these to be Map0. That will make it when we start up the editor, it goes to this map and when we start up the game, it goes to this map, and so on. I'll also go to the project description and say, if you want to avoid the annoying comment that says this at the top of each of the scripts that you create you can change that here and that will populate that top comment on your scripts with whatever you've put here instead but since I'm not adding any scripts in this particular project, I'm not going to bother doing that. Once we're done here in the Project Settings, we can just click the X in the upper right-hand corner and close that panel just as you'd expect. The art assets should go into a folder called Art. When I double-click Art, I'm only going to import one FBX model into this particular game just to show you how that process works but generally you have multiple models in your game. Typically I will create a folder for each of those models that I'm importing. So I'm going to right-click here and I'm going to select Import to Game/Meshes and Actors/Art... and here's where I'm going to import my model. I'm going to navigate to an FBX and select that using this browser panel. Once I've selected that, we'll come back and continue with the process. I've selected a static mesh called SM_Yellow_Teddy_Bear, that's the FBX file name right there and I'm going to leave everything here as default. I will say that this is a static mesh. It's not something called a Skeletal Mesh, which would mean that I'd want to check this checkbox here but the Skeletal Mesh, it's got bones and it's skinned and it's rigged to do animations. We're not going to be using any of those kinds of models in this specialization. We're focusing on the basics of C plus plus and C plus plus in unreal engine, doing interesting things. We're not focusing on the more complicated 3D things we can do, like animating meshes. We'll leave that for your future exploration. I'm importing a static mesh. I'm leaving all the defaults, and I'm saying import all. I'm going to turn on magnifier. Down here in my content browser, I end up with a number of different components of this static mesh. I have the mesh itself, right here. I have a material for the mesh, right here. I have a diffuse or specular texture for the mesh, so it's color and so on, and I have a texture that specifies a normal map for the mesh. I made a big deal about following the naming conventions at that website. But the name of this static mesh, for example, the base asset name shouldn't be in snake case here, it should be in Pascal case. That's an easy fix. For me I'm going to right-click and rename it. Now I can just make the name have the base asset name in Pascal case instead. You certainly can have your artist change this as well. But I wasn't very specific for my artists about how exactly I wanted everything named. Some of these are pretty close. It turns out that we want static meshes to start with SM. We went textures to start with T. We want materials to start with M, and so on. I shared some of that with him. But I didn't actually say the exact name I wanted to use for these assets in the game. I could certainly have had him go back and rename everything in Maya to export. I didn't have to rename here. But it's certainly reasonable for me to just rename them here as well. I'm just going to rename all of them. I will also point out, if you didn't actually have to rename them, you still want to save them. These two assets have stars, which means they haven't been saved as you assets yet, unreal assets. If you don't have to rename them, you can just select, Save All and click Save Selected and it will then save them in the unreal asset format. But I'm going to rename them. Renaming them automatically saves them as well when you're done renaming. But I'm going to rename these so that everything is the way I want it to be for my asset names in my game. Just one more to go. I'm going to turn off the magnifier now. As I said in the previous lecture, when we take an asset and we drag it into the map, we have turned that asset into an actor in our map. For all the games, in all the courses in this specialization, we're just going to set x to be zero and we're going to play our games in the yz plane. Y goes to the right here, that's that green arrow and Z goes up, that's the blue arrow. Now we've added our static mesh into the game. As you can see in the World Outliner panel, it's got a name and we can rename it here if we'd like to. We can change it to moving, if we were going to move it around. If I click on the actor here in the World Outliner panel then it focuses me right in on my actor. I think I'd like to actually make YB zero and ZB zero. By the way, you can navigate around the world with your mouse. I'm going to let you just to explore those different ways to do it. It's not worth me just saying, "Well, sometimes you alt left-click and so on." Just experiment with that, to navigate around the world. I am going to get rid of the floor. I've just selected it in the World Outliner and hit the Delete key. If I play the game right now. Sadly, I can't actually see the teddy bear in the game. That's okay. In the next lecture, we'll see how we can add an orthographic camera and change our lighting source so that we can actually see the teddy bear in the game. The focus on this particular lecture was, how do we actually import the static mesh into our project. To recap, in this lecture, you learned that a model is a graphical 3D asset. You've learned that when you import a model into unreal, that you get a mesh, one or more materials and one or more textures. You also learned that an actor is something that we've placed in an unreal map.
