Blender to UE4 | Live Training | Unreal Engine

[Music] you hey everybody welcome back to the Unreal Engine live training stream I'm your host Alexander Pascal and joining me today is Tom Wright Mike Erwin today we're going to be talking about blender which is awesome and we're probably going to have to do multiple live streams on it because as we've been talking about all morning there's so much to cover as far as getting blender objects made and brought into Unreal Engine right under L engine - blender in the back again etc so today we're going to start at the very basics but um first Tom why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up doing this life sure I am a senior technical artist what they call me here I'm basically a generalist that works in marketing to do a lot of their marketing imagery for Fortnight Paragon whatever comes comes around so and what I've been using blender since about 2008 I think I was introduced to it at Naughty Dog of all places and I worked there for a few years a guy a programmer guy introduced me to it and been using it steadily since like 2.5 the new interface and then when they came out with a new renderer I really jumped on board cycles so because I'm a lighter mostly yet film and television and so then I worked my favorite lighting tool was a renderer was Arnold and cycles is very similar to Arnold so yeah loved it well I never even yelled Arnold so that's like a new one for me that's cool it's actually funny as I was using blender in 2006 but I was I didn't do what you guys did was in depth and kept rolling with it really well in hard so you know I Gould's nowhere near as good ya know I really start using it honestly until Arnold our until cycles when cycles came out and it just felt like Arnold in every way and it was GPU based and everything that I wanted in a renderer so then I started really playing with blender and wanting to see what it could do and was pretty shocked at the results I was getting very good stuff cool yeah yeah and and so I guess in the rendering side of things Mike that's kind of your specialty once you tell us a little bit about how you got onto this one - sure sort of the rendering I'm more on the real-time rendering side which is a lot which is definitely in sync with what you guys are doing here at epic and and so I've been a developer on the blender project since 2010 and I've been doing it full-time for the past year working on the new or the upcoming of release for 2.8 and I've worked on smaller things up till then but this is the the first real big push we're doing for for real-time graphics and getting that really in the front seat versus uh up until this point it's been a lot of offline rendering doing animations things like that and you can do your modeling things but we really want to get the real-time lighting and real time scenes right there in the viewport as you're working and then that's an ER also kind of working on the the Eevee kind of project - that's what a bit a bit I'm involved in that the main developer is not here he's over in Paris but working with those guys and really doing the technical side making sure it runs on all you guys's computers your laptops the stuff you already have and their new high-end stuff - and so getting it work on Mac Windows Linux all that yeah awesome thank you so much for for making it out here - by the way so it's just really awesome to actually have a real a real blender first yeah that's actually it's super convenient cool yeah I don't know that there's like an open sore oh yeah thing here in Raleigh yeah the biggest come open source companies in the world oh yeah based here yeah I didn't know that until I read your Red Hat as one of the tallest buildings yeah it's res headquarters is based right here in Raleigh yeah it's a head Linux it's it's sort of funny it's sort of like I don't I guess it's nerd central it is it is like really like Raleigh it's got kind of like it's all of us here which we talk about Linux yeah it's like it's like yeah between Linux and blender and Unreal Engine and like all the different game companies over here you know there's a little bit of every kind of dirt so it's really great it's like one big happy family so yeah it's it's really awesome we've met it at a drink up how did you guys meet that but we didn't need an apostrophe or four yeah yeah you hold it up over Twitter yeah and here we are yeah that's all we're in a blender shirt I was like that guy I'm gonna go meet that guy he's a that's actually is like a little nametag just as you know my car went blender like that's how I need to know that you're talk to yeah yeah so yeah so we've got some really awesome stuff to show off if we wanna if you want to just like hop right into it clay after the main screen you already got you already beat me to it good work get to you're on top of things man we've got a lot of questions about blender and how it works with Unreal Engine 4 and they're more than we can actually cover in one show so hopefully we'll be back soon and show you everything that we possibly can I figured I'd start out with like the simplest stuff and work my way forward a lot of people are asking about the shading the the grand shading or the smooth shading and how that works how to get that from blender to unreal so there's no magic in a lot of this what I'm going to show you it's simply exporting stuff properly I think but smoothing does just work so they both use the same type of our smooth basis which is make T space am I saying that right Nick T space is it Mick to space or Mick T space because he said it's actually been questions nice I feel like I think we could get on like another programmer to have a stealth at one well I know that the mick stands for Mickelson because that's Morton Mickelson mmm from Naughty Dog that's the guy who introduced me to blender which is so I did not know that so the make T space when people say oh this you know Unreal uses make T space is blender compatible with that well Morton Mickelson was a blender dude like total blender that's all he used so he wrote that on blender to begin with so that they used the same they calculate the same way the same smoothing way so I'm going to I'm going to bevel the same control B pull this thing out and roll my middle mouse button to give it some edge and this will be not smooth to begin with so there's a couple of ways to do this we can either export out the the tangent and normal information or use like I say in that make T space just let it calculate in that all you would do is tell it to smooth just smooth a face now you'd want to there's some tricks to this because you don't always get the smoothing the proper smoothing as you can see here it's smoothing a face and then it just abruptly stops and that's not really what you want but it will export exactly like this you don't even have to use tangents or anything and just export this and it'll look exactly like this and unreal but this is incorrect because this is basically a smoothing error so a couple of ways to do this you can have it smooth all the way through in the sense that you switch over to faces that's edges over to faces and grab these two faces and smooth them also and you'll get a better result but that's still a smoothing error see that little line there so the best way to do it would be to cut and this probably takes a little bit of explaining I see smoothing errors a lot in people's even people that have modeled for quite some time I see smoothing errors and their stuff because they don't quite understand how the the shader is working but basically what it does is it will smooth across faces or vertices that are at some kind of angle until it meets a flat surface so gosh it's hard to explain without looking at it so if we were to look at this object let's jump over here and look at its vertical so we can kind of see how this works so looking at it from the top you can see that this this vertol is not straight right it's not straight so it doesn't understand to where - stop smoothing so it's going to smooth all the way across this thing which of course we don't want that we want this to be flat so if we put a couple of edges in here just in control are you can actually see the smooth change see how it's flattening out there so we can flatten that out as much as we possibly can I usually use a couple of these things but because again this is much better you can use a couple of these to flatten these areas out and all you're doing again well if we look at this from the top it comes up to this edge and it sees a flat and it knows where to stop smoothing I wear - what's flat what's what smooth that makes sense it's things flying all over the place in there so if we export this guy we should get a result that looks much like that so let's do that export FBX I had that thing selected right let make sure I selected that thing I use people in chat also suggesting the edge split modifier I'm going to show that in a second oh okay okay that's the third was getting ahead of him yeah yep that's very very clever yes that is true because I was using smooth faces I'm going to choose faces for smoothing now I don't need to to export the tangents at this time because again the tangent space is the same and unreal as it is in in blender so I think I'm using this thing here I'm going to call this like something like box smooth smooth test or something something cool like that X part and then here I've already I think I made a little testing did I make a testing folder didn't and blender testing there oh I did good I then I'm going to drag this from over here at the guy already got these these windows open we're not doing Bob yet we're doing there he is box smooth test okay I'm just going to drag him from there to here wait for the little plus so instead of teaches all the super-secret import options yeah the only thing really I mean we're looking at is this the compute normals right we compute the normals for this make T space if you notice if I change this this will get ghosted out on import tangents so we'll just say import the normals or compute the normals rather not important and that's you know that's why I say there's no real magic to it because there's not a whole lot of stuff I'm I'm doing here usually I'll do combine meshes if I'm working with bigger stuff and it has multiple objects but that's that's pretty much it for this if you look at this guy see it's telling me I don't have the reason I'm getting this error the reason I'm getting this error this degenerate tangent is because it doesn't have any UV map it doesn't automatically make UVs oh yeah it's later so you'd have to make your own I'll make one just to get rid of that error yeah and it's Mick it's Mick T space it's Mick T me for Mickelson yeah yeah and then T for tangent that's Mickey sniffs ah nice okay good but yeah that's Morton no more Morton actually works for our competition now he left blender he went up to San Francisco to work for the guys that do Tomb Raider which that company was that Louis to do um Crystal Dynamics oh oh that's not art that's they're not no no then he went it's very different than what I figured I said no do you word he works there now I don't know you know it will be soft no it was and I saw no no I do it alright so as you can see the smoothing is smooth where it's supposed to be smooth and it's flat where it's supposed to be flat and that's not using anything special yeah I don't know there's not much else ages works any do I have to use any weird plugins or any like no no there's nothing nothing strange about this it just exports straight out let me jump back to blender with all these crazy way through dad is not blender that is not lender okay so the other ways of course they were saying just split normals that's a even more efficient way to do this actually because you're not adding any geometry I mean the truth is you know this is not very much geometry to add this is Chi it's kind of the correct way to do this is to to pull more geometry into it because unless you're making something for you know mobile platform you would probably bevel these edges and actually get some some more geometry in there which I can show in a second like how if you smooth this entire thing let's just dissolve these edges because if you went out and just smooth to everything where's the big smooth dismiss vertex no it's the oh because I'm in and yeah I'm in edit mode so if you smoothed at all see all all the oszi you know really gets crazy but even this this is what's weird even this thing works if you want to start exporting tangents let's pull this a little bit so you have Auto smooth that it's a blender specific thing so it smoothes anything within this degree angle so if we put 89 degrees which is anything under 90 degrees we tell it to smooth anything under 90 degrees which is this face here but flatten anything that is 90 degrees are over so all the 90 degrees are flat in that places that area is smooth exactly really what we had before except where we're using a trick to get it and this will take you you know because the FBX is not going to know this thing is on so we will have to export image it for this but I can show you that works just fine and also while what we're kind of messing on with this mesh a lot of people in chat are very curious about exporting and importing an in gone like polygons with anyone I just did and that isn't that's kind of an okay thing is it just what a reiterating that that's all right that's what yeah that's what I just did the top of that as soon as I beveled that it created an egg on which is a polygon that has more than four vertex so it didn't have any problem with that again some of the questions like get confusing to me because it's like look at just yeah right and it wasn't most of the time like I don't have found very little that doesn't work yet because I think everything just gets turned into tries anyway so it's all yeah kind of happy fine so um heck was I just doing okay so I'm going to do selected object back to that face my geometry face but this time I'm going to select the tangent space and you know what because I'm tired of doing this over and over I'm actually going to make this is a cool thing about blenders it has these little areas where you can make your own and make my own export which is ue4 because this is normally how I do this oops so I've just made my own ue4 and that will do the selected object a face smoothing with tangent space but those you know this this will have no problem either we won't switch over you can either re-import oh no we can't reinforce this because because we need those tangents so I'm going to delete this guy and i can't just right click and reemployed us what I mean I'm going to have to bring him in and get back to my settings because this time I need instead of computing this I need to import the normals and tangents now there is there is a way to change that in the in the object but I don't know how to get that I've never had that work like if you change it in the object and then re-import it just with the right click I've never had that actually work I just delete it when we import it it's probably the smart option yeah it doesn't seem too but as you can see again no problems and if you hold down what L you can pull the light around and kind of look at it yeah if I can do this roll around there we go yeah so yeah this is smooth those are flat so it does it does it doesn't hate that auto smooth thing as long as you export the tangents with it it's fine because blender is really doing the auto smooth and exporting the final yeah well yeah yeah yeah so blenders doing the smoothing for you and when you say export the tangents with it then the FBX is saying okay I got this tangent information and then you're importing it into unreal it has no problem I'm and I haven't seen any difference between the two because they're they're both smoothing in that T space right yeah so it just doesn't have a problem and then if you really wanted to like properly you know if you turn this off and want to smooth this entire thing and this is kind of back to that smoothing lesson and turn off this this thing give her that menu you'd need to flatten these with geometry so if I went into let's see edge mode because we're going to grab every edge that would need to be changed which would be every hard edge basically then we we bevel these and even just one bevel would be fine yeah so and you can see even in blender how how much better that looks but that's still a smoothing error they're still smoothing errors it's not a totally flat that's right because it's not there's no inset edge there for this thing so we'll select these would be faster just to select the face right and then look down on it with the seven key we're going to hit eetu extrude and s to scale you can do the shift Z to make sure it doesn't go scaling on that Z for vertice or z axis rather and then I'm gonna you know I got to close I do this sometimes I got too close to the center or mi oh I got this on that's why it's being weird a snap yeah uh yeah snap is my greatest friend of me he's scale or not scale e to extrude s to scale and then I'm just going to pull it in just a little bit I'm gonna hit GNA this guy over because the idea is that I'm creating a little bit more geometry that's not great but you can get the idea I'll see you at I didn't I didn't use that shift Z so we'll just use it we don't have to be in that because that cool shift Z feature but e to extrude s to scale shift see it means it's taking it off the z axis and then I scale it in a little bit so what I really love about blender users in general I've noticed this like no matter where we go but now chats really like making it clear there's always a guy who knows the hotkeys like better than anybody else and they're like why don't just press I for in set and you do oh oh yeah see there's always this is way like our chat to get they're very knowledgeable already yeah well we'll we're learning here yeah exactly yeah can we do that for you should just hit in set for these let's try it in set and then take it down yes it worked perfectly thank you masked man Linda thank you several people in chat you did it chat I wish I knew that when I was modeling my kitchen cabinets right yeah blender is an amazing selection of hotkeys for everything I one of the reasons I really like it because I'm come from the old lightweight days and lightweight was extremely hotkey centric so did I really just do that I did um everything apparently in set is relatively new so is it a go well we're gonna we're going to try it again I'm going to inset all these everything that needs to be flat do I need to I don't need to do that one instead and barely okay in sets the opposite way why is it in setting the the wrong stuff well I guess I need to bevel it for us one thing bevel little tiny bevel and then we'll grab these and then set them geez Tom and set now it's working okay nice and it looks great and then I should be able to tab out and we get the same so now we have the smooth part smooth we still have this we're going to have to get cut it down yeah I didn't because I didn't want to inset the face because it would grab that other edge too so I think a better solution would just be to cut this one again it's just modeling tricks like I think that's a lot of the complaints and by the way like if somebody thinks this is a blender specific thing it is not this is how this shader works on in every package that I've that I've ever used from Maya to Lightwave this is how this works so cut these and we should have a nice a nicer smooth through and then flat and this will work of course also in the in the entire thing is smooth it's just creating the flats with geometry which I always think is the right thing to do but you may not want all this geometry so the last one like someone mentioned would be to split your edges what you know I actually like the fact you can go out into object mode and hit undo in it like undoes everything that you've just done so you can work in like you can work in the edit mode for like an hour and go into object mode and hit undo and it undoes everything you just did and it my personally liked that because one thing I'll sometimes switch back and forth to be like this is what it was before this is it now you know undo redo let's do I don't like seeing those freaking normals get out of there let's do the other technique which is the whole thing is smooth we're going to grab the stuff we want to split I need to be in edges yep it's going to be the same thing we're going to ctrl e and Mark these guys sharp I think we're still going to need the same cuts on these to get them right but this does nothing until we add the modifier to split the edge where is that edge split alright so edge split what that does is literally cuts where it cuts out whatever we've told it to mark sharp so though there will there will be two or more vertices now because it's literally cut this PTIN this piece is actually a separate piece which works perfectly inside unreal also has no problem oh sorry to interrupt the people in chat are wondering if we could turn on the keys pressed options how do you do that that's it's in the in menu they said that there's a I don't know that is there's a keys pressed in here yeah or something along those are something about what I'm pressing I was we had the blender guy on here he'd know if tapas but I admired what this done I thought that was like a plugin he had to add in yeah I need to install add-on Oh God now they mentioned it's an add-on so like go ahead on that's yeah we just turned it on yeah okay there we go is it here what is it called keep rescue said try try G he um now try it like show me geez screencast screencast screencast isn't it no they removed it what sorry I should be in the default we can't so yell out your uh we can't be displayed sorry guys yeah if you don't know how to make a bevel by now no control B bevel control E I'm I'm trying to say them all and I just learned it looks like it's not it yeah we'll just one eye for insect I'll try to say at them all as I'm going but I've got this guy selected I'm going to do the same thing export FBX again we're going to want those tangents because I did scream at go up in the add-ons screencast no screencast and show up okay so it looks like they were they were removed we have to add in I don't think we even need tangent space for this one so let's go back export because again it's going to split this in unreal is going to see these as separate separate vertex so let's go back here again we can't use this one let me get rid of it we'll bring it back in and this time we want it to calculate I don't think in that case I don't think it'll matter either way but I think this works fine oh no it doesn't we do have to calculate it see all these moving errors so we do have to calculate that strange so we'll have to bring it in calculate it are not imported rather really delete bring you back over that's why I kind of leave that on I just use the export tangents and I just import them again it always seems to just work fine important so there we go and this is using almost no geometry no extra geometry just the cuts there and it's the same thing it's smooth where it needs to be and we should talk about scale too because a lot of people were asking about scale alright so but that's smoothing I mean I feel weird because it's like this stuff is so simple I'm just like yeah you smooth and then export and it just works so that's exporting there's little there's like three ways to do smoothing there's many many ways to do smoothing it's just it's all about how you manage your geometry but but it it seems to import quite nicely I don't want to say something about the smoothing in the upcoming blender 2.8 that's not out yet in viewport there it looks it looks a lot smoother it looks closer to what it does when you're pulling in it in engine oh yeah and you don't have the like if you have a rectangular one with different normals it doesn't have that weird split where you can see the two try oh yeah and so but unreal even has that like it does have a little bit so I guess blender is gonna be better than oh no no no you gotta lean oh okay okay I'm gonna have to anyways and yeah that's just a that's just a way that we do the shader in the viewport and so that's one of the things that's in there already alright I'll believe it when I see it there ya go download a test build let's talk about scale I'm going to create a cube let's knock this up to the floor now this will happen knock you up to the floor properly properly um turn that thing off because it'll kill me like plane so this when I created this this was 1 meter radius which is actually a to 2 meters per side square if I was to export this by doing basically nothing FBX export we're going to just use the same thing here and the same hey you know what how did that not work when tangent space where it wasn't on anyway we're not going to look if that is weird because we didn't export the tangent space isn't it once we imported it it still imported it probably it might add those tangent spaces even though we're not telling it to so in this case we're 2 meter side box square let me just do that just to make sure it's the right thing export you and come back over to you just right click and hit rien port it's the easiest way to do this so in the easiest way to to look at this or test it just to drag it into the scene and then grab another box here box prep try get into the scene put it on the flow and it looks about twice as high and the right line because it's only one meter once we make that two by two by two it should be exactly exactly the same just not sitting on the floor wait what's that trick end right or end how to drop it yeah yeah end does it wait does it have collision well if it doesn't have collision that won't know how to collide anything I think so that won't that won't do I should have put on the snapping proper snapping thing but you can see all the z-fighting yeah because that's how you know they're overlapping just fine literally so the question is like why does that work and that works because if we look back over here in blender when I go to export this guy because it's right now it's just using blender units if I go over here yeah that's unit preset is really nothing it's using blender units which is just a unit it doesn't really know what that is but let's go into the export setting I want to show you something real quick this little button right here what that does is it tells it sets this unit scale factor inside the FBX which tells the unit and it says it right there default FBX unit which is a centimeter so it sets that unit to a centimeter which is exactly what what unreal uses if the only downside to this is that if you want to work in meters and centimeters you want to see that like instead of seeing point zero one you want to see one centimeter then you really do need to set this to meters but in setting this to meters you need to set the unit scale point zero one which is going to be the same equivalent now this thing is Thai it's no longer you know it's no longer two meters what you have to make a new box so you have to do this beforehand if you want to work like this you got to do this first you can't start making stuff and then change this unless you want to skit you know if it's just a static object you can just scale it up but if you got a rig or something you really want to set this first but honestly I don't I don't set this stuff I just leave it on blender units because it doesn't bother me at all that it says you know point zero one for one centimeter and there's a buzzing meters in your head that's right you know or be like me and don't think nothing there's nothing up there I'm going to remake this dude shift C to get that centered I want to get rid of these things because there are little tiny things now not C X good bye good bye so now we got you would have to change the clipping for this guy but shift day we're going to make a another cube see it's one centimeter that's basically what that was we're going to make this one meter the same as the other one right and then let's pull that up to be on the floor again if you want to change this viewport setting that's over here in the side panel or is it the clipping starting line yeah so you just add maybe ten times to it come on 100 is that marking yeah there yeah so again export FBX and here's the kind of the trick to this is you got to turn this thing off turn that off because that won't turning off scale yeah that scale that unit scale factor is what changes that unit now I'm not sure I I don't think that works with that on I'm pretty sure that would break what we just did with the meters and everything but I guarantee it works with it off and turn that off and it will not change your scale so export go back over here to unreal and then we import that guy you can see that it didn't change same so okay can we get rid of the Z I think no I love it there you go yeah so once we imported that change to the because we're using the same anyway but yes it's the same size so scale is scale there's two basically two ways to get the proper scale to do nothing which I do and let that let that setting be set in the FBX file or you can probably do what's there probably the right way is if you want to set the scale to meters at point zero one and then make sure you change like you know you're clipping planes and things like that I just want to deal with all that it's just a matter of being consistent with what you're doing right yes yeah I think that's the bottom line in that that's kind of a lot of the theme of this because I noticed that with even importing characters and things like that is as long as we're consistent and that's why I've and we'll get to that next I guess is the blender the mannequin I'm using rigify to do this and as long as you're consistent with this it really doesn't matter what you use doesn't matter if you use rigify or pick to play or whatever the other one is or it just doesn't matter as long as you're consistent you build it too the best way to do is to build it to the blender or the Unreal mannequin and then then you can start importing your stuff in retargeting and that's kind of the key to getting getting that to work what's next importing skill dude let's do it yeah I'm cool they actually in fact all of chat seems to be really into getting a skeletal mesh imported an export oh then let's go out and hang on oh yeah let's talk about about 3d modeling theory for another solid few minutes you know but in all honesty like you joking aside I do see a lot of errors a lot of like smoothing errors I think that's one of the and I'm not even talking about game stuff like just stuff the people who duck have done for me yeah mr. it renders better than we can do one little thing you guys can do everything sometimes that's a bad thing though because I think I've seen people build stuff in like max which I think has a very forgiving demeaning viewport yeah and then you get into other stuff and it just looks terrible and you try to explain to him look you built this wrong and they're like no no it looks fine in my viewport yeah well it's still not right let's see all right character yeah it's get him in all right let's do it so she should be in recent here so this is the guy that I built I built I didn't build this guy this is the Unreal guy this is came from the the image actually if you look at the default it's the one this is the image that I gave you mm-hmm same dude he's I just imported the mesh with his weight maps and like the lazy bum that I am I just changed the name of the weight maps to match the rigify rig so so what we get is the scaled blender mannequin guy now he's scaled he doesn't I did not scale him to our did I oh no I didn't even though it says meters here I can promise goods it is not it is that that same same thing the FBX button to get this guy out of here because again he would be ginormous and I don't want to deal with that but we might want to make it depends on will probably see what what people use most if if people are just screaming and yelling it needs to be a metric or whatever we can always rebuild this guy easy enough I think I think he's you know because again all I did is renamed the his weight maps also a big deal is to make sure that he's zeroed out I don't know why puts a little negative a friend zero but make sure you guys if you're if you're rigging your own stuff check that out though yeah that's yeah but but this is that's the thing is that's I think that's why that's unit scale one because it's like down that shouldn't be that's a big no-no I should not have that little little shout out to Kevin Vasi who would be very upset if he saw us right now like you did that completely wrong but it it still works trust me guys as I'm going to demonstrate in just a second so I am using a I'm using a small script I'm cheating a little bit as you can see in in my scripting mode I'm using this thing called I think it's called unwritten or rigify to it this says rigify to unreal so if you google this thing and it'll I'll have it with this matter we can give this to them I mean I can if you want me to sure you just hand it right over all right yeah we'll give this to you guys it'll have this with it is it's a GPL it's C Creative Commons 0 we just got to give a shout out to this dude chicka chicka gay Bobo what I'm not making this up man TK bow chicka bow bow chicka bow bow good work take the bow bow yeah thank you sir because fine I really should use the tools like a lot of people say have you used the Unreal tools there's like unreal tools for blender and I'm like I really have it in the main reason I haven't is because I haven't found anything that doesn't work yet so I think if I found something didn't work or or if the tool said hey this is a one button you know fix to you know I don't know something that I have to click 20 buttons for then yeah I would try it out but so far I'm like I'm sure it's great and I will try it eventually because so many people are saying you gotta try this tool I will go in there and try it for sure but for now I'm using this rigify - unreal unreal Faiz what I've been calling it in this thing basically just bakes down all the information to the base bone set the deformation bone set of rigify so you can animate whatever you need and then bake those things down to the deformation set so I always do this with like separate files I'll have this as its own file in its base pose and then have a completely new file to do animations in and I do this just not to confuse because sometimes you have to make changes to this thing I don't you know of course I built this so it's perfect so you'll never have to make a change to it but if you did you would save this as its own have another file that has the animation link this guy in there so any changes you do to him will automatically go to your animation would be the smart thing to do but from here I don't know why I got a ground in here I don't need that ground let's get rid of that you can grab the object mode of the his rig shift select his the actual geometry I put him all in one piece by the way instead of him being he's pieced out I guess in Maya I think you just run the script and you can kind of see what the script does it happens like instantly but it exposes his deformation bones it selects his deformation bones and and it selects him so he's pretty much good to go right here so just running that script I can export him export FBX and I'll use the same little ue4 thing that I made earlier you know chunk him in the out thing here I've already exported him once or yeah at least once to try them out well which is right right over that export and should be able to pull him straight in here I'm going to I'll pull him into here for now I'll take it all and won't bother to face name the same as the other guy right no no wait for that plus I mean it'll just assign him another name I think Oh might I thing I changed I was playing with this make sure it worked earlier is this this Toa reference pose this just says that that frame zero can be the reference pose and that needs to be checked on because blender uses frame zero to do to set all that stuff if you have more targets they work you can turn those on if you want to and you can create the physics that the other cool thing about that little unrealized script is it does change the scale in order to work with unreal physics I'm just going to import normals and tangents because I set that and it works and that's it I don't think there's anything else I've you import and you can seem come in no errors no issues there he is and I can even steal I'll put him down here and go if you got the like this is the third-person guy I can go in here if that's not okay those are their verses in blogs but yes where's the dude oh he's under mannequin right yeah yeah yeah sure sure I don't worry there's my lace materials I'm gonna plug him into here and you got really the exact same thing so there he is except the only difference between this dude and the regular mannequin is to jump over here to a skeleton you'll see that he is an unwritten a lot about this people don't like having this node okay the extra root yeah yeah which I have found no problem working with this but you are saying 4:16 I guess if this is named armature sadly it's there's a new feature for 16 I'm not sure if that's exactly what it was but I do know that they I'm gonna look up the exact wording because I don't want to I don't want to misquote I think it was Matt coolants Matt who did this and I haven't tried it but mainly because I don't have any problems with this yes but it should be if it's if it's like armature if it's the armature bone that it should get rid of that let me just see armature this is what I like the 416 release notes are a lot of fun to read through by the way when importing an FBX file from blender the importer now removes the root node named armature so yeah yeah yeah there you go name an armature and yeah which is I thought this thing does not name it armature it means it names it unrefined but I think I did that I was gonna say like we've established that this guy didn't all of us say goodbye yeah so I think that those for you yeah yeah right there so new rig name just change that back to armature just change again and that should solve it cool also other things to be aware in here non delete bones like so if you have a ponytail eyes you know things like that you all you have to do is start is plug those in see has i left i right you just plug that in here any bones that you there's even constraint bones again just plug them in here any bone that you don't want deleted there's a place for that and i tested that with eyes a while back and it does work fine so so this dude is our skeleton now the reason why i'm not going to i'm going to use the one i already imported is because in order to not this that's not what I'm looking for right now not yet in order to retarget this guy he's got to be set up and I just I start with like Auto mapping because I'm again I'm just lazy so if I if you select you know a human rig and hit Auto map it's going to try to do this for you and it does some things like it put hips in the pelvis and but it did all a lot of this wrong but you need to retarget or setup the retargeting for both your rig the rig that you just brought in from rigify and for the the Unreal rig in order for this to because that's kind of the key of this in order to use the animations like if you're going to if you're going to animate the stuff yourself you have this is not going to be a problem in fact let me kill let me kill him because we already we already have him alright we honestly we don't have to you know it's weird to have two of these guys though right yeah I think it is so let's go back into test where's my testing blender testing I'm going to kill this guy because we have him really hold ctrl and click thought I was delete there you go horse delete what is he referencing nothing really right just cuz I had him open yeah they're probably just using each other yeah that's it all right so he brought him in he's under this dude blend man it's the exact same thing same thing except this one if we look at his skeleton and we look at his target manager you can see that he's actually set up properly I hate to use the word properly because I'm doing this pretty fast and on the fly oh I see key them in bassy Oh Kevin snuck into the room but it but it works like so this may need some changing when as we move forward but this distends to work pretty good and I even did advanced all the fingers and everything so he just went there and manually said oh the manuals yeah exactly hit the auto try to automatically find this first and it would find like maybe one or two of the finger bones and then it would find something else from great but if you're doing some kind of weird tentacle monster then you definitely have to set it up yeah but that's for a humanoid so it you won't get your you're going to have to animate that anyway so you'll just you'll build that and animate it by hand and that's why the first thing I'm going to show you is not is not going to be the retarget just because I just want to show you how easy it works without doing that because you really don't have to do much once you I think I have bobbin here already but I want to import him just so you can see I don't see him yeah so we'll stick them in here in my testing and that is alright I never saved this thing once it what it does is builds a new empty or a new null and it places that unwritten all those those bones under here so I just when I'm done with this I wipe it out and start over so I never I never saved that this mode of it where it's built these bones you can you can get rid of this stuff and go back I've done it but it's real pain in the butt it's a lot easier just to go reload blend man you know and you're back to where you are in this case we're going to load this dude Bob matter of fact we're going to load Bob walking and this is just some crappy model that I did a long time ago it took me forever to get him to even look look right in the engine but you can I bake down all this all those materials using cycles worked fine these actually looks better in engine because I have this is what I was telling you about the simplify yeah so when I use this simplify C house his subdivision surfaces will I can set that here and simplify to it and it's like a scene level thing she's kind of cool but yeah he looks like this but he he won't run well like that so where's my yeah it's just below the yeah that's our there I'll use it for helpful right thanks windows alt a I'll pay to run that is that a toggle yeah it is right but yeah so he's he's walking and we can take him go back to that script scripting again this should be in object mode select his rig shift select him and run that script is this the yeah that is that right script yeah rigify run there we go bones notion nasty droid off of our twitch chat says you can use open subdiv on multi resolution instead of simplified you were just telling me and just kind of yeah I I'm learning lots of things today so this is it as you get in front of the audience and they just they just they know so much like really there's been a ton of streams where we've been corrected fire road audio it's a lot it's good yeah means we know nothing and so the script here the way you're using it your head you have your rig set up and you select it and you do this right before export right as yes is preparing it for export exactly it's baking you got to bake all the animation down anyway so it'll bake a keyframe on every single frame of the animation and that's what we want we don't want because if you have a curve a curve is different a calculated curve is different per per engine or per you know and my blenders curve is going to be different than my curves it's going to be different from unreal square so instead of having to deal with that we just bake it all the way down we create the curve per frame and then export it out cool alright we are getting a little bit tight on time school whenever you get finished with to you next but we might have to go to questions then we'll have to come back for another stream where we'll have to talk more about animations blend spaces and all kinds of cool stuff yeah but we don't have time to get into today there's just so much I will have to have you come back on and all it to but yeah I'll get through this and then man we have a ton of great questions too okay export let's get Bob in here so the trick to this is because we've we've already loaded the rig so the biggest thing is we want the mesh and we want that blender man rig that we imported earlier because it's the same thing right so everything else is good it shouldn't blow up on me skill to measure influence count she's max of eight did I set that up correctly let's look at Bob is not animating let's see I might not have had selected now the import animations the export FBX well I want to make sure that where's my mean o selected scale everything with trying explore right yeah don't change much I don't do much these things you can always pull this thing down and make sure that it actually exported all right didn't have any errors where is that at that Windows not it's not available here because this big TV I think I know it's here yeah so I can roll down make sure that yeah see that on the log that did export let's try it again where are these guys now you're watching me they're just judging your every move and trying to find a better way of doing everything you do don't worry good there's probably should probably is a lot other ways to do this yeah um these are me playing around for the last several months come on Bob you do it no you can't why can't you why don't you like me makes it smooth because the influence count of 10 exceeds the max can of eight max count of what all right Bob we just tried you just a second ago and you worked fine I think you worked fine let's do let's let's do this just grab Bob himself import animations box was unchecked was it yeah I didn't even notice the videos use chat like come on guys this is amateur hour so when you import them make sure that you have the actual bring in the animations as well please thank you checkbox checked yeah yeah okay hold on you're sure he's right it's uh important mashaallah DS your destinations there you go I'm sorry guys I mean idiot thanks thanks chat you guys are not on by default you know I I thought it was do you know Kevin's over here like nope no it's not it is not all by default but you would assume that is all right we still getting it yeah go getting that but at least we got the animation right yeah we got the animation this time so but the bottom line is that that does work and the thing is I did I make sure I did that correctly I get rid of stuff did I not see we told them that we would teach them how to like you know that it wouldn't be a live stream if we didn't live crash at one that is a feature note you didn't leave a detailed importing blender mesh and to leave did it no okay I see I see here's a just an empty one point Manson here too we're going this is the this is your finished one oh but that one that other one was my finish ones here mm-hmm so for Bob don't you rigged and animated in blender right right right well in rigify and the idea is that you when you import it you just select that blend man that I had imported earlier testing I'm going to throw Bob back in testing come on what No throw em in here I just want to make sure that people see that I'm selecting the blend man Keva doin come sit over here and judges every move instead of sitting behind the camera so that's the one style earlier and information yeah you can actually you can lean it if you need to you know Alexander oh you're not gonna get a lower third which is a microphone for you all right but so surprise guest so he looks a little weird here because he's still the dude let me swap him out for Bob do I have a mic now I don't know we had him out for about at Mike I've treated like one Bob the skeletal mesh come on bud why does they open these passing okay cool awesome hey everybody hey Kevin I do like his very graceful walk with his legs kind of like you know it's good like this yeah yeah all right let's just do it this way what have you done Tom I'm throwing Bob in here okay and then I'm just got telling that you are an animation asset and I'm going to drag your animation here BAM then you went through the floor for some reason but if I was to play there's Bob I don't know why some walking into the floor like you could pull them up out of the floor he doesn't have to be in the floor but normally he just chooses works normal oh by the way this this guy right here is is actually the the blender man dude also so your guy you're jumping around ass I think that we targeted the animation for yeah let me we verify that that's true before I say that yeah Tom how much did you go through and retarget because I know you were looking at doing quite a bit I did all the all the 60 well not only did I read target this is crazy so before I realized the retargeting tool was so good that is the third person repeat that is not oh you ready - you ready to learn another thing lies yeah yeah I got this working out smart so the bone influencer problem is because you for only allows for bones max to influence a single vertex so you have to normalize your weights and blender to bypass the air makes sense so so I'm going to add on top of that mm-hmm you can actually go up to 8 now but for for cloth oh so 4 is your max for cloth but you should be able to go up to 8 so I think you guys were getting an error right it was complaining about over 8 influences pervert yeah so in Maya when we're using that for all of our actual game stuff that we do here we have all kinds of checks and balances in there to sort of set that and set it and forget it just during the export process well when you're rigging and skinning the character you want to make sure that you're keeping that limit in mind so that you don't end up with with and normally you know if you're if you're waiting well you're not going to go above that and lecture it in like a cinematic film TV into that kind of level alright so you have quite a few questions from chat that we should probably get into because we're going to get overtime doing these questions so totally had this this working we should do just one that's like this specific thing because I wasn't going to do that today anyway because it's way even complicated but getting into the animation blueprint and getting him working with you know and that's strictly like the switching from the Maya rigged to the rig right right right and it all it is is building out the enemy P that I showed you and yeah the state machine and that kind of stuff so like a doctor for a stream pasting yeah yeah and it worked like it worked no yeah we'll probably have to do that is like a full like character from 0 to right hero like all that kind of time flat yeah yet no time flat you know it looked like an hour to a little takes time to make they need a know what I'm talking about Oh is a Hercules reference yes yeah we should give them this blend man let him play like find The Fault in it like we already already found that I didn't set the scale right so but it worked but it totally works like yeah it's not it's not too huge of an issue as a chat is very enthusiastic about blender so many so many blender fans that's awesome to see yeah it's really cool um so couple of questions for you and the first one Tom you actually were talking to me about this when we and you have it you had a very interesting example but will be the correct workflow for importing a whole scene from blender into Yui using just like import two-level feature and bring it all over because you were talking about how the origin affects things and yeah well one of the you know a something that I do that's a huge cheat for some of these Paragon images the the teasers in particular because they'll want to get the camera really close to something that is a game object it's really not meant to be all that close is I will export this stuff out of engine and turn it into a mesh like you just kind of FK move things around freeze it down add displacement because I'll take some of the even used which is what's the open source crazy bump thing oh yeah yeah awesome awesome bumper awesome and something like that yeah that thing is great by the way so I'll build a height map out of that and then throw it into blender and then freeze down more geometry because I'll subdivide it subdivide it and then freeze that down and then bring it back into the engine and that we can get really close to - but I can also in cycles yeah how cool yeah yeah so what I also do is I can build the entire scene right there in blender and build the things that I need I can model the things that I need in sitting right in this the spot that it needs to be and then zero out all its transforms so when I bring it into unreal I just zero it out and it pops all into place so it makes the scene for me that's probably the easiest way to that's you could build a whole level doing that I don't think I'd recommend it because the whole idea is to is to build things that are easily instant scible instantiated instantiating is it is saying it I don't know if it stands a muzzle word I know I don't know it's good yeah but you want to build things that you can copy and move around and build the scene in in the engine yeah it's highly recommended to build a scene that way much more efficient but you could always build your content in blender and of course you can also instance in blender in the modeler so you can have the same thing all over the place all those instances be recognized by the engine that's an excellent question something we should test if you can't bake those down that's something that should be added for sure yeah increase your scene file size everyone's looking at you giant yeah yeah it would make it a lot larger since knowing are instantiated but still a view it is instantiated no if you were to bake it why would you bake it out it's instanced now it's instance here ideally yeah ideally if it does but yeah I had more particularly my deals yeah all right so this one this one is one of those questions and that's posed in the form of a question but please ask them about mobile development techniques so I guess that's if there's anything in particular with blender that people should be aware of that's going to be heavy or light in mobile development as far as making a model it's going to don't do X because it actually tanks on mobile or something like that no nothing special has the regular techniques I think anything blender specific there is just do the way you do your models and the way you set up your you know whatever material system you're targeting just you know best practices there whether it's blender or something else all right and this is this is another question free you Mike so can blender provide a solution for making hair and fur assets or how would you kind of or maybe any of you guys would know how to tackle it's got an amazing hair system yeah built into it and I've seen a plugin that God made a plugin I don't know if it's free or what no it's not free but a guy made a plugin that you can take care and turn them into strips for games okay um I don't know I have never used it but it'd be something to explore like every blender plug-in I've seen it's dirt cheap it's like the Entune box which is ridiculous say that out loud and um you're gonna you're going to change the market this it's crazy I still play some of these tools it's you know the the there's a hard surface I can't remember what the dollar tops thing are tops yeah oh yeah it cost like five bucks or something is something crazy but I see really cool work Maya has an equivalent of that it's like $900 so the guy yeah hopefully that guy's not watching right now yeah over here over here shaming Emma is it like this it's a really good tool sorry we just don't have 900 bucks I'm weighing around the hair modeling I'm not sure about game specific stuff but we're we're definitely there's somebody working on here full-time right now no um yeah and uh and some good stuff coming out of it and making it really responsive to actually model and to to groom and all this stuff and a lot of that came out of I mean the first big hair thing was big buck money that came out years ago Garen for right that Oh didn't you guys higher the is your hair guy like um it was somebody famous right some of the wrote will be here on a shape in a hair cutter one I thought it was someone I working on it right now it's named Luca and he's um he's working on that primarily okay right now I and a lot of that came out of for the new barbershop one which barbershop hair all that but for the characters there there were they wanted to get it look right while they're modeling while they're putting it all together and like how can we do this real time in the viewport I want to comb this hair essentially you don't want to specify where it comes from and but it works so well more like didn't like it cause a lot of that a lot of this tools no all news all new stuff coming Wow hopefully they're good too I will sure they will be I will say engine wise for hair strips is the way to go and probably either and Amyx or as a 416 I believe you can do cloth in engine now without having to have a setup from the Nvidia plug-in so by all means take a look at the the in engine cloth and annum dynamics for what does that mean o8 measures um there's there's some the the solver is Apex based ish but you don't necessarily have to set everything up oh I should mention apex works apex totally works fine with blender but know that when you import these rigs it'll take out the dot the period and replace it with an underscore so when you're working in Apex make sure that'll that'll generate an ASCII which is really easy to do a replace so make sure you replace the dot RL with underscore L underscore R and it'll work fine yeah it's it's set up to work with Maya largely yeah and Maya forces the underscores and the dots all right so we should plug real quick um yes lender cloud oh yeah yeah yeah it's a big deal like if you're if you're working in blender you should be a member of blender cloud you should be paying for that service it's dirt cheap it's like a hundred bucks a year and you get a ton of stuff out of it it's everything from textures to HDRI images freakin training tons of training it's it's well worth the hundred bucks and if you're even a hobbyist if you even opened blender once a month you should be a cloud subscriber that actually answers a few questions that we were going to have time to get to like where where should I go to see blender tutorial probably blender zone is a way to support there are a lot of really good stuff to CG copia CG cookie that's cool alright last question because we got to get running out of here so last question for everybody thoughts on the upcoming release of blender 2.8 and ue4 in general oh yeah it's gonna be so awesome yeah awesome like right now we in a few weeks we're gonna have two point seven nine as that just a small point release but it's got some good features in it but really we're just saying you were reading an announcement just earlier there right oh no not announcement I mean it's all it's all that little too loud okay I thought we were gonna get I was hoping to get the secret of the exclusive the skill OOP no it's coming over reason and we're not doing any huge major changes that you won't have to relearn blender until we come out with 2.8 2.8 it's got a lot of new things and an entirely new focus on on real time work and so a lot of that is doing work for game engines like some of it is you just want to you're doing a cycles render you're going to do a movie or whatnot and you just want to see that while you're working in real time that's close to what it's going to look like in the render without hitting test render all the time but a lot of other big part of that is you're targeting actually something that is going on being a real-time playback real time engine game engine things like that and so that's gotten a real that's going to be a real big push for the next one cool yeah super excited about yeah and PBR and the whole thing I'm sure they're just going to benefit everybody across the board too so that's awesome yeah all right so we have a hundreds of questions pouring in as fast as humanly possible I'm just gonna so y'all know I have officially stopped reading the question I'm sure we'll be back with the whole blender stuff I mean it's exactly what I was going to have to say like well Mike we're gonna have to have you come back on you know Tom laughter you got a heaven we'll have to make sure that it's not conflicting your schedule of a hundred things that you're yeah right in the middle we just got a new guy from like ILM that's a huge blender guy right so he's using blender as well yeah he's hit me with Ziggy he's going back he goes by jiggy GS started that we're doing here so Ziggy yesterday he was he was secretly using blender there and I found out he's using blender here and uh-huh I kind of secretly used blender on a few things from battlefield yeah Call of Duty yeah we've we've said it in pipelines I say I say it like secretly but you know how it is when you when you walk into a studio of the utmost professionals and you're like hey what about blender guys unfortunately you still get the you know kind of reaction and it it's not as much it's because you know like it's been a mainly saying yeah otally totally yeah they mainly say we're not gonna support that which I understand that you know you go whoa whoa yeah which is like fine you know I don't need support my exporter my blender exporter for Call of Duty worked better than their in-house exporter that's that's the truth in-house exporter would make would make their UVs outside of zero at all mine would do it zero to one every single time per yeah that's incredible and you were telling you told me earlier that an old friend of here is a got in contact with you about about needing blender at a certain point oh yeah there was a whole group of guys that went off to do indie development in when they started looking at like licensing stuff besides only they stopped scoffing yeah pretty they're they're calling me going hey how do you do this now you do that and and then within months they're like dude this thing is really cool yeah and that's what seems to happen to everybody it's like it's oh yes it's for real yeah it's it's the there are old industry standards and then over time like like we're seeing blender just go from carving a niche out to just being huge for for indie space a triple-a space is starting to get more and more so and even some of my favorite TV shows i watch them then later I'll find out it's like oh man in the high castle we have all the visual effects in blender or Silicon Valley we did this and this in blender I'm like yeah that's awesome so seeing that stuff it's really inspiring that's obviously cool but um so to get will have to have all three of you guys come back on and with proper lower thirds for you to I know that see because right now you're kind of we're joint sharing me Alexander Pascal lower third but but yeah well we'll have everyone back on we'll talk about things like blend spaces and all the other things that we didn't get around a chance to cover here because we only a finite amount of time of course but thank you all for coming out thank you so much Mike for making it out to I know you all have busy schedules so it's really cool so glad you managed to draw up in dance man good see everybody again it's been a while yeah but that's it so we'll see you all next time see you Thursday bye bye you

Channel: Unreal Engine

Views: 89,818

Keywords: Game Development, Blender, b3d, 3D Modelling

Id: KDP7GHFtAtE

Length: 73min 39sec (4419 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2017