Making walls Solid

[enter360]

Right now we are using Maya to make our 3D models and when we import them to UDK, our walls are completely hollow. When we go to fracture the mesh we have hollow walls and the model and fracturing don't work well together. The walls have the same dimensions and orientation when we made the model, there is a very thin wall with space and the other side of the wall. it's almost looking at this | | . So I am asking what are we doing wrong that makes our walls hollow when we import them into UDK? Can we just reimport our models or do we have to rebuild all of the models from scratch?

[reinrag]

You mean you can penetrate inside the wall ? if so then you only need to create a collision for the wall, do you know how to do that ?

[enter360]

No we can't penetrate the wall the collisions work and everything. It's like the inside of our wall is missing. The best way I can describe it is that their are two planar brushes parallel to each other and between them their should be CSG but it's not there its empty. So when we go to use the fracture tool it still fractures in a 3D space making our fracture models very poor quality.Does that make more sense ?

[reinrag]

Yes it seems to, do you use planes to create your models or boxes ? i'll try right now to do a fracture with one of my model and i'll see how it turns out,

[enter360]

We used boxes in our 3D programs. Alot of our models start our in Google Sketch Up Pro and then are imported into Maya and then saved as .fbx then imported into UDK and fractured so that is our entire workflow. Could this have any affect on the solid v. hollow wall issue we are facing?

[Graylord]

There's no such thing as a solid mesh, all models in 3D are "hollow". Unless you are talking about voxel graphics which is something else entirely.

When you slice the model after generating chunks, it should fill in the gaps of the sides of the chunks. If that doesn't happen there may be an issue with the model.

Does the sides get seperate physics or do they fall together as if they were stuck together? Basically, are the sides seperate or whole chunks?
I'm guessing there could be gaps in the model making the tools interpret the model in a different way than you want.

[enter360]

They are whole chunks I am trying to accomplish the same affect as seen here (http://youtu.be/Y80Eg_Jj2J4) at the 50 sec mark. My models don't act the same way they are hollow and not filled in. Graylord do you have any idea where in the workflow this could be happening ?

[reinrag]

Are you able to accomplish this with UDK's stock assets ?

[enter360]

yeah the fracturing works great. I have no way of doing it with the assets that I import

[skwisdemon666]

Rule 1, don't use sketch-up. It simply isn't made to produce game-usable assets.
Rule 2, if you ignore rule 1, make sure you weld all your vertices so that your mesh is one element prior to export.