- Removed hardcoded element type arrays (Vertices, Edges, Triangles etc.). Mesh element types can now be arbitrarily added, with any number of channels.
- Mesh element containers have a much leaner format; instead of sparse arrays, they are now represented by a simple bitarray, determining whether an index is used or not. Consequently, mesh topology is now entirely described with the attribute system, e.g. edge start and end vertices, triangle vertices, etc.
- Support added for attributes of arbitrary dimensions, e.g. float[4] or int[2].
- Support added for attributes which index into another mesh element container.
- Added FMeshElementIndexer: this is an efficient container for maintaining backward references from one element type to another; for example, edges have an attribute specifying which vertices are at each end (an attribute of type FVertexID[2]). With an indexer, it is possible to look up which edges contain a given vertex, even though this is not explicitly stored. Indexers are designed to do minimal allocations and update lazily and in batch when necessary.
- Added support for preserving UV topology in static meshes. UVs are now a first-class element type which may be indexed directly from triangles.
- Added the facility to access the underlying array in an attribute array directly.
- Triangles now directly reference their vertex, edge and UV IDs. Vertex instances are to be deprecated.
- Changed various systems to be triangle-centric rather than polygon-centric, as this is faster. Triangles are presumed to be the elementary face type in a MeshDescription, even if polygons are still supported. The concept of polygons will be somewhat shifted to mean a group of triangles which should be treated collectively for editing purposes.
- Optimised normal/tangent generation and FBX import.
- Deprecated EditableMesh, MeshEditor and StaticMeshEditorExtension plugins - these are to be removed, but they still have certain hooks in place which need removing.
#rb
[CL 13568702 by Richard TalbotWatkin in ue5-main branch]
#rnx
#rb none
#ROBOMERGE-OWNER: ryan.durand
#ROBOMERGE-AUTHOR: ryan.durand
#ROBOMERGE-SOURCE: CL 10869210 via CL 10869511 via CL 10869900
#ROBOMERGE-BOT: (v613-10869866)
[CL 10870549 by ryan durand in Main branch]
Provided a path for building MeshDescriptions for static meshes at runtime, and supporting API.
Clarified use of attributes for static meshes; now some attributes may be considered optional.
Added FStaticMeshAttributes, used for fetching and registering all the attributes required by a static mesh.
Added Blueprint interface for building meshes.
Deprecated a number of existing APIs:
- FMeshDescription methods which referred explicitly to static mesh specific attributes
- StaticMesh attribute registration has been moved to FStaticMeshAttributes
#rb none
[CL 9123037 by Richard TalbotWatkin in Dev-Editor branch]
