How to properly create assets in Maya for use in UDK?

Adrian Pieroni

Hey guys, i'm a game development student here in the labs at Durham College. I'm modeling a forklift in Maya to be used as an asset for my UDK level assignment, and I was wondering what the proper way is to model it. Currently I have a tendency to use the more time consuming method of creating and manipulating everything from a single mesh. I know that I could be quickly creating numerous simple seperate meshes and combining them together to form what will be the finished product, but because no verts/edges/faces are technically connected that way, i'm not sure about whether or not it's the proper method.

Can someone let me know how I should be approaching this?

Scruples

Assuming you don't want individual parts of the forklift to move just turn on backface culling in maya's viewport and model however you want, merge everything together and export as FBX...thats the short of it.

Realistically you want to set up Maya's units to match UDK's units scheme before doing anything else, explained here
http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/udk/udk-maya-how-to-set-up-grid-in-maya-to-match-udk.php

Keep in mind you also want to triangulate any models before exporting.

I keep my textures in TGA format, UDK will automatically link them to your imported object, this is assuming you are using FBX for exporting, have applied a basic material with said textures, and textures are in a power of two ratio...it will even compress them to .dds format for you.

You can generate a collision in UDK automatically or you can model one and import later with obj format.