Render Data

Mesh and Material

Cube’s static mesh and material.

Let's start with assets. To render our cube, we need two assets: the cube static mesh (UStaticMesh) and the material (UMaterial).

More about Static Mesh: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.2/en-US/static-meshes/

More about Material: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.2/en-US/unreal-engine-materials/

Persistent Data

Please note: this data is permanently serialized and stored on disk.

  • Mesh: Assets are exported from external DCC tools and then imported into the engine using the Importer in Unreal Engine, serialized and stored in the form of uasset.
  • Material: Created within the engine using the editor, and similarly serialized and stored in the form of uasset.

Save and Load

This asset data is loaded before the game loop starts.

During my test using Play-in-Editor (PIE), both the cube and the default material were loaded when the editor started.

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For the static mesh, it will load the data from disk, and create an FStaticMeshRenderData , which contains LOD infos and vertex factories. We will talk about the details later.

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We will discuss the details of Render Data in subsequent chapters. However, in this section, simply imagine Render Data as a data package that is permanently stored on the hard disk.