How to edit the color of a motor using Unreal Engine from the skeletal mesh Mathworks UAV

Hi, I have a question that might be more related to Unreal Engine (UE) than MathWorks, but I hope you can still assist. I’m trying to assign different colors to each motor of the SK-QuadrotorUAV (located in the MathWorks UAV Content folder as a plugin to UE), as I want to create a customized UAV for tracking using image processing and computer vision in MATLAB. For example, if my algorithm knows the front-left motor is pink, it can track the UAV and identify its pose based on that color.

However, I’ve been having trouble isolating the material slot to modify just the motor color. I’ve also tried exporting the FBX file to Blender to edit the materials and colors, but with little success. At this point, I’m wondering if it’s even possible to edit the UAV in Unreal Engine directly or if it would be better to create a new, generic UAV from scratch rather than modifying the existing one.

I’d appreciate any advice or suggestions on this. Thank you!

Answer 1

[Nishan Nekoo]

Hi Shannon,

I wasn't able to modify just the part - it looks like you ran into the same issue. One workaround is to just place a primitive cylinder shape around the motor that is slightly larger:

I did this in Unreal, but you could achieve the same thing using the Simulation 3D Actor as well within Simulink. As long as the Cylinder is made a child of the UAV, it should move along with it.

Hope that helps!

Nishan

[Shannon]

Amazing, thank you for investigating.

How were you able to achieve this in unreal engine? I tried adding a socket to one of the motor's component when editing the skeletal mesh in UE but was unsuccessful. I was going to try add as a child in simulink but the dimensions provided here https://www.mathworks.com/help/uav/ref/quadrotor.html are a bit vague where they start/end and what the angle of the cross configuration is for the drone. Thanks again, this has been a huge help!

Shannon

[Nishan Nekoo]

I added a cylinder shape in Unreal and just scaled/moved it around manually until it looked like that.

I just replicated this in Simulink - I created a cylinder using the Simulation 3D Actor and then used the interactive GUI to scale and move it around until it looked appropriate. In Simulink, you can then set these values from the GUI on the "Transform" tab of the actor, duplicate the actor and invert the X/Y translations and Z rotations for each of the 3 other corners.

Right click -> Show Actor Hiearchy. Then Right click on an actor > Edit Properties, and you can manually change translation, rotation, and scale values:

I've attached the model!

Nishan