BLENDER TO UNREAL ENGINE - FREE, FAST & EASY, - FULL GUIDE! (blender tutorial)

hey what's up guys and welcome back to ask anki today we're taking a look at the brand new epic games on real engine live link with blender 2 unreal engine and today we're going to look at two major things one is like very basics how you can move your assets directly from blender over to unreal engine how you can set things up and you know create your own wonderful pipeline then the second session of this particular video is where we're going to be talking about you know some technicalities that you need to keep in mind so if you're thinking about making rigs you're thinking about using the rigidify section of this tool then we're going to talk about that so without further ado let's get right into it first things first you need to have on real engine and you also need to have a copy of blender you need a github account and once you're done creating that github account go over to epic games on real engine website i'm gonna put link in the description create an account hover across your name go over to the section called personal and underneath it once that page loads you would also notice that we have a section here called connection once you click on connection you need to connect your github account to unreal engine without this you're probably not going to be able to see the website number one where you have your github and you're probably not going to be able to use this tool as it stands so once you have that connected the next thing which you need to do is download these two files you need to download the send to unreal and also download the ue to rigidify so once you have done these two you can now fire up both blender and unreal engine now if you simply go ahead and open up blender first things which you need to do is to load up those zip files click over to edit go over to preference and once preference loads up go over to the section called add-ons and within the add-ons that is where you need to load these things up click on install select those zip files and load them up so once you have bought the cento unreal and also the ue touring file loaded up you can now simply either click right here to save your preference and close so with this done what you need to do is just simply click on close and once you have this closed the next thing you need to do to actually get your unreal working is once you fire up your unreal engine and there is a project which you're working on you can simply do this within the settings what you need to do is simply go over to settings go right here to where you have plugins and search for the word script now the reason why you're searching for the word script is because you need to enable both the python script and also the editor scripting utilities now you need to make sure that these two are turned on if they are not you might definitely have issues all right so you need to turn on this and also turn on these other one now once you turn on these two you need to hit on the restart button to restart your entire project so we're going to restart our unreal engine and once this comes back we're also going to go through and talk about other modalities and things that you need to keep in mind before you actually start sending things directly from blender over to unreal engine so with this loaded up the next thing which you need to do is also go right here where you have your settings go over to your project settings simply go within the search section and search for the word remote execution now what this does is it enables the remote execution of your python plugins or your python scripts that will work remember earlier we kind of updated and opened up the python thingy and that is the main reason why you're doing that right now so once you do this you can simply go over and close this and jump right into blender and just like that you're ready to rumble with this particular stuff so one thing to keep in mind the unit skill that you have in on real engine and the unit skill that you have in blender are two different unit skills so the unit scale you have right here is about 100 times bigger so let's simply take a look at what i mean if i bring susan the monkey right here and hold down control and tap three on the keyboard we kind of add a subdivision so with that subdivision i can simply hit on apply and automatically you would notice that because we already added the add-ons we have pipeline all right and you will also notice that we also have three different collection boxes now what do we do what we can do right here is to use the collection boxes to organize our files how we want them to be imported directly into unreal so suzanne would actually go over to mesh since it's a mesh file and with that done we can simply click on pipeline export send to unreal now once you do this what happens is unreal engine fires up the python script and simply kicks susan directly from here and brings her directly into unreal and once this comes directly into unreal you'll notice that we have a brand new folder right here known as untitled category so i'm just simply going to double click there you also notice that we have untitled assets also double click right there click drag and drop directly within the viewport and we'll be able to see suzanne in all of her glory now one thing to also keep in mind is we never gave suzanne a texture and that is why she's looking this way so with this right here we can easily navigate across this particular model and you can see what it looks like and you can definitely tell that this model is extremely huge now the reason why this model is huge is because directly here in blender we did not position our scaling system or we did not define our scaling unit to match what we have in unreal so how can you do that how you can do that is simple go right here where you have your sim properties and directly underneath where you have units you need to set the unit scale to a 100 of the default blender unit skill what i mean is you need to dial this to 0.01 something like that so you can get this right here so with this now you can choose to save your scene skill or your unit skill so that you don't have to redo this all the time by going over to file default and save these as your default or you can go over right here where you have your edit go over to preference and with your preference loaded up just simply look for the send to unreal and make sure you have always use on real scene skill turned on if this is turned off it means you have to set this all the time if this is turned on you can actually go here and save this as a preference now with this done you don't need to save or you don't need to change the unit skill all the time so what do we do now let's actually try out something else now the reason why we're making this cube is because we want to play with it i would actually go in here and take out the camera and also the light because we don't need that press m on your keyboard and set this to mesh so that you don't forget and the next one which i'm going to do is press the tab key you know select one part maybe select another part and press i on the keyboard and of course you can use any of these wonderful tool sets that the guys at blender foundation has provided and you can actually you know get some pretty stuff working for you right now i just want to make something like that and also maybe push something down like this so with this right here if i choose to send these over to unreal engine what will happen is i can consistently make updates to these and also get them applied there so let's fire up on real engine and see what we have and with unreal engine loaded up you can notice that we have a folder we have right here i can simply click and drag this right over within the viewport and let's give it some time to load and right there we have this another thing that we can do is we can choose to play with the scaling so you can lock the scale open the scale depending on what you want to do if you lock the scale you're going to have a uniform skill or you can simply use the scaling tool right here to do that so right now i'm just going to lock the scale and set this to 0.1 i guess that's a bit too much so let's make it 0.5 yeah something like that something very visible press f on your keyboard to zoom right in and then you can hold down alt outside the mesh and a beat around if you hold down alt within the mesh you're going to make copies and that is not what we want to do alright so hold down alt outside the mesh and you can update across this particular thing so now that we have done this if we jump back into blender and we simply press the tab key and select one particular part press i on the keyboard to in set a face you know use the previous tool that we have which is the extrude manifold all right then make some changes like that let's also go in there press two on the keyboard make some selections maybe make another selection like there press you know ctrl b and add a couple of bevels something like this if we have this selected and we hit send to unreal one more time what will happen is directly in unreal engine we're going to have that quick update something else that is very interesting that you can also do is this applies to both materials and also to you know the meshes that you have so it doesn't matter the kind of mesh you have which is live on your viewport once you have an update directly here in blender that update will carry through so now that we've seen how that is you know a wonderful workflow for everyone let's see how we can animate stuff so animating things is very easy and i think everyone would definitely want to get this one going so let's just pretend that this object right here is an object we want to admit or maybe a prop so what we can do is we can hold down shift and a and go over to amateur and click on single boom we're going to talk about how you can play with this once very soon and once we do that you would notice our amateur is way smaller than what we have here as the cube so to actually match the skill what we can do now is to select this particular object and go all the way to where we have object properties and you know match up the scale and i'm going to do 0.01 just like we did previously 0.01 point zero one now why i'm doing all of this is just in case you find yourself in a situation like that you wouldn't have problems so the next thing to do is press the period key and you find that that will balance the skills out first things to do don't forget to make sure you have your amateur loaded up here within the rig and then you have this as the mesh so with this done you can select the cube select the amateur itself hit ctrl and p on the keyboard and then go over down to where you have amateur deformation and make sure it is weight automatic weighting now once you do that you would be able to now control this within the pause mode or should i say you can now pose this particular object by simply using that amateur so now we have one thing done animating this is even way simple because we can just simply click on automatic keyframe hit i on the keyboard and you can choose to keyframe your location rotational skill or you can choose to keyframe all of them at the same time so let's do that and then i'm going to go over to 40 and you know just simply do one more time and of course i'll go over to 20 and move this all the way up now if i move this all the way up let's maybe move it about the point like that i would also want to rotate this and because we have our auto keyframe turned on once we press the back button and press the playback we're going to have these animation happening all right so getting this to unreal engine is even way simple because at this point we can just simply jump back from our pose mode over to our object mode go to pipeline go to export and send this over to unreal engine the chances that you're going to have this error or probably you have had this error is definitely there now the reason why you're having this error when you first sent this file over to unreal engine it came as a single looking mesh so for you to now get this out all you need to do is to go all the way back delete these untitled category just simply delete it and then you can go ahead and reload this there if you want to have a mesh that you only tweak as you move across that would be perfect so just work on the mesh if that mesh would be animated you need to make sure you have defined amateur before sending the mesh over to unreal engine in the first place so now that we have this done we can now simply go over to pipeline go back to export and send these over to unreal in this way we'll be able to get our file directly here so if you don't have rig before you have to delete the folder and bring this back and once we jump right into the asset you can now notice we have the skeleton we have the physics assets we have the cube and then we have the animation so the animation which we created which you're going to load right here and remember we turned down the scene skill so i'm just going to fire this all the way up to 50 so we can actually see something all right so we're just going to fire this all the way up to 50 and position this right here now if you press the playback button you'll notice that we have our animation happening we can go all the way back and see what's going on and that looks cool doesn't look bad at all i can press escape key just to jump out and let's make this about 35 35 looks good i'm also going to go ahead and press the playback button press s just to zoom all the way back and you have your animation directly from blender right here in unreal engine textures is also something else that applies with this so if you're thinking about textures you can also jump right here in blender and make sure that you have those textures done you can easily define by going over right here define the material type that you want right now i'm just simply going to set this one to red and let's send this back to unreal engine and see what we have so if we move these or ship this back to unreal engine and simply double click you would also notice that we don't have this now the reason why we are not having that is initially when we send this content out we did not you know send the content with a texture or we didn't send this content out with material so you also need to define your material define the things that you want the basic things of life before you ship this so now that we have all of these things let's select them go over to pipeline export send to unreal engine and right now you would be able to have all of this in their glory right here in unreal like right now you can see that we have the material as it quietly loads we can also go in here and load in our you know our animation so let's throw that animation right in there and i'm also going to set this to 35 so with this let's position this where we think it should be and press the play back button so now you have all of these things working for you if you want to animate your scene you can go ahead and animate your scene if you want to look around your scene you can also proceed to doing that so in this way you have your files coming directly into unreal looking exactly how you make them for blender and this is the core basics for those who you know were sticking around for the core basics these are the core basics now let's get into some you know technical side of things now for the technical side of things we're going to simply start off with something i believe if you're here for the technical side you should have an idea about so what we need to do is jump over to blender and what we're going to do is to play with a very simple character which we're going to simply apply the amateurs to so real quick before we talk about how you can apply those amateurs let me show you guys how you can get that so for you to get the amateur going you need to go over to edit go over to preference and you need to come right here where you have your add-on and activate re-gif now the reason why you're activating rigidify is because that is the tool that you would work with by simply using the unreal engine to rigify and the irigify tool itself is a pre-made amateur creator what i mean by that is just in case you have no idea about this if i turn off the rigify and come right here and hold down shift and a you'll notice we only have single bone within the amateur but if i turn on the rigify i can go over to amateur and i can define a basic human basic you know quadruped let's get that right so you can do all of those definition and you can also define you know different kinds of animals and you can define a full human character so what we're doing right now is we're going to simply import a very very simple stick figure character and we're going to go through and position these things all the way through now the beautiful part about working with gfi is you don't have to position everything you just need to position one part of the object and once you're done you can go over to amateur and click on symmetrize symmetry you know just make symmetry and it's going to go through and create symmetry for the other parts of the model and this is to me one of the fastest way of rigging directly here in blender alright so with our rig ready and everything looking cool let's play back very tiny head animation that we did all right this doesn't look bad i think yeah right so i think it actually stops so i wanted it to stop somewhere about there okay cool and there was a very tiny arrow that we didn't actually fix and that tiny arrow happened while we're fixing while we're working on this and if you take a look here you would notice that this and this doesn't match so i'll just see if there's a way we can fix that and there you go so it doesn't affect the animation whatsoever let's turn off auto key and let's switch back to the pause mode and you know of course you have everything looking fine so now that you have your animation going the next thing which you need to do is jump over to your object mode switch this back switch this off and at any point in time if you don't want to see the mesh you can always go here and turn this off so that you can see the amateur and at any point in time you don't want to see the amateur you can also turn this off so we need to plot this which is the amateur so i'm going to press m on the keyboard and fix this to the rig and also these other one has to be within the mesh which it already is at this point so the next thing which we need to do is just to make sure that we have everything selected or you know unselect them go over to pipeline go over to export and send these over to unreal engine right now we have our untitled category and directly here you can see we have our default you know material and we have our animation right here you can choose to drag and drop this animation here but what we want to do is go over to file we want to create a brand new level now i'm just going to get a default brand new level so i can drag this bad boy right in there and you know press f on the keyboard just to make sure that i can see increase the scale to about 50 so we can get a higher looking mesh of course i can press the playback button and look around and we would see our character animating you jump back into blender and you choose to reanimate this so let's uh take a look at that and let's update the animation of our model and maybe at a point like this i would like my character's you know hand to go all the way up and maybe i would like it to swing forward and you know all the way down so let's simply do that and you know very funky stuff to do i'll also go right there and re-update this so already we have our model working directly in unreal and then we have our animation happening there so what we're trying to do is to find a very fine point to see if you update your animation if your animation would also update alongside with that you can see that that animation doesn't update instead what we have here is there is a different animation called the meta rig action 2. so just in case you are wondering if it works if you want to update that animation you have to update the animation and get rid of the previous one that you had before so this is how you can get this one going now with this set we are also going to take a look at something else because there is a second plugin and the only plugin we've been talking about ever since is the sent to unreal and we haven't talked about the ue for ig5 and to do this i'm simply going to get an fbx file which we're going to try out so first things first i'm going to clean this up get a brand new scene go over to file import important fbx file what we have right here is a ninja now this ninja i actually went over to make the mode downloaded you probably might have seen this ninja from our animation layers video so this is it so i'm just going to go ahead and press play back and you can see this is an fbx file that simply works you know from one point to another if you go ahead and press the n key on your keyboard and go over to ue to rigify you will notice that we have a section called source so i'm just simply going to click right here and define the amateur as the source now this works in a very interesting form and interesting form in the sense that you are sort of retargeting so you will be able to use the rigidify to to get a control rig that you can send over to unreal engine so a lot of you know videos or a lot of people have actually talked about the fact that there is no concrete you know tutorial about this and that is the main reason why we're adding this as an additional part of this particular video so how you can get this going is by going right here to where you have as you know create new because if you use the unreal mannequin it's just going to create the mannequin based off the unreal mannequin template that has been made before so what we're going to do is just simply click on the template drop down and click on new so we're creating a brand new mannequin and we don't want this mannequin to be rigged with facial features we just want it to be a mannequin with a basic human you know setup and another thing that we need to do is we need to define the name so since this is a miximo file i'm just simply going to call this mixxaml alright and press the enter key and also click on save and this is going to save these particular templates now once we do that and save it you notice nothing happens if i click on convert you will notice that we have control rigs but our animation doesn't even work with it so how do we fix this how we can fix this is simple if you click right here you'll notice immediately after source we have edit meta rig now the edit method rig is a form that you can use to target things to where you want them to be by default symmetry is turned on so if you select on any joint and press the delete key you can easily take out the joints and what you need to do is just to simply click and match individual points to individual joints that you have right here like right now we have the shoulder you can simply carry the shoulder and just match that right there and the same thing happens you know if i want to match several other parts i'm also going to be able to do the same thing so real quick let's run through and do this so while doing this you would notice that we kind of missed some joints the whole idea for retargeting this particular stuff which i think is actually what the guys from unreal engine are doing with this tool is for you to be able to have a very good and straightforward looking you know control rig that you can use so once that is done the next thing you might want to do is switch over to this section called fk to source because if you save this and you choose to hit the convert button you would notice that it seems like everything looks working perfect and you know you press the playback button one more time nothing happens so you need to switch this to fk to source now switching this to fk to source is where everything actually starts making sense because at this point you can select the joint which you want select these are the joints that you have right here hit alt and one on the keyboard and click link selected bones now once you do that and you switch over and go over to the control rig like we are doing right now you will notice that this is now clicked to that point so if you press the playback button you would notice that we have our control rig following that so how do we get to work with this and get it done faster so what we can do now is let's simply go ahead and reverse the entire thing and switch this back to fk to source and once we do this fk to source i would also click right here and directly down here and change what we have right over here to bone remapping nodes now if i switch that to boundary mapping nodes i would like to make sure that wherever i have that is called left now once i'm remapping this that automatically the right one should also happen so to get this going i need to come right here and type the word right and then for here i'll type the word left now once you have this done the next thing that you would probably want to do just to make things and make life easy for you is just to simply match what you had previously so i'm just simply going to go ahead and do that real quick so at this point if we simply get all these things done and press the play back button you would notice that we've you know successfully linked a whole lot of other parts so it's now totally left for you to go link up all the other parts that you want like we have some missing joints right here so you can choose to link these things up depending on the hierarchy of what you have i think for these one we can link this up with the heap which i think is what it is let's link that up there all right so that looks good let's go ahead and press the playback and of course you can see that is happening right there okay so if you're done making all of the things that you want the next thing which you would notice is right here you already have these things all linked up and because we chose to go through the route of right and left we have all of these nodes linked up right here the next thing which you might want to do if this is good enough for you is you can also choose to switch over to control and you might notice that once you switch over to control press the playback button this doesn't work but when you switch over to fk and source and press the playback button everything seems to work so at this point we would need to go over to source to the form and within the source to deform this is where we can link the source to the joint so that we can get these things to the form now the reason why we're doing this is so once we switch over to control we'll be able to get control of how we would like to play with the control rig because contrary to that you would only be able to control the fk only when you switch to fk to source so right now we're going to simply take a look at how this can be done and it is pretty easy based off the fact that we've already taken a very close look to something like that so the same thing select one select these other parts you know the corresponding part and link them up and you would notice that automatically it's linking because we're going for a t-pose right now and the same thing occurs right here i'm also going to select these select this other one and link this up as well and you'll start noticing that we're having a t post model so once this is done and you're ready the next thing which you need to do which is extremely simple to do is just to hit the save button and then you can choose to toggle on or toggle off animation override but in our case we do have an animation so we're just simply going to toggle on animation override and click on convert now once we do this what would happen is the tool right here is going to go through and apply that deformation from the source to the rigidify tool and at this point once you press the playback button you can see that you have that both in pose mode and also in objects mode so if we go all the way back and press the playback button you can now start seeing those things now for these other stuff that are right here you can also choose to play with the tool a little bit more to see how it works but then if you want to play more with the riggify tool you can find them right here as you can play with the rig layers and once you switch over to pause mode you can select any of them and you know play with all of the features that you know that comes with them so this is about it and of course i would like to know what you guys think about this in the comment section if you want to play with ik fk you can switch that here if you want to simply stick with the ik you can have this for yourself and of course if you want to also proceed to add some animations to this you can go right here you know press add on the keyboard add as much animation as you want to add over to this stuff and once you're done you can simply go all the way back and send these over to unreal engine and sending this over to unreal engine is pretty neat as first things you will notice is because we have used the ue to rigify and we have this right now you can now notice that we have some extras we have the amateur and we can simply proceed to bake this right here so once we bake it's going to bake all of what we have here into the skeleton just like you have in motion builder and we can now easily send this over to unreal engine and if you're thinking about textures and stuff you can always go over to the shader make sure you know where these textures are as these ones are the textures that were working with this so you need to know where the textures are and those textures you might want to load them within the material editor and how you can get this material editor is by double clicking right here and you'll notice you have the material editor going for you so what we're going to do now is just to simply load this in so you can see how it works and if for some reason you cannot find you know where your textures are how you can easily look at them especially if you're getting an fbx file and you don't know where these textures are you can click right here and say you want to unpack this and this is going to unpack it to whatever directory that you wanted to unpack it to that way it's going to be easier for you to you know find where the textures are and you can easily go from there and get things going for you so with our texture here what i'm going to do is just simply load up on real engine and because we've already opened the material i'm going to click and drag this right in here normally i would suggest that you create a folder where you're going to have all your materials and then you can have all of your textures there so there are two ways you can actually apply this material you can click drag and drop right here and then proceed to link your rgb over here or you can link your rgba depending on the kind of material you're working with or you can right click the texture and create material from texture now this way once you do it you'll be able to create a brand new material from the texture so let's simply allow that to load or you can just simply click right here and load this over to this point if you're done just simply click on apply and hit save to save this and you're good to go you know by the way once you update this texture here it simply updates right there or you can just simply click this drag and drop so either ways you're going to have your textures running very smooth directly here in unreal if you want to work with the sequence app that is totally fine or you can just simply go through and press the playback and you have your animation coming from blender right here into unreal engine so easy so this is basically about it i'd like to know what you guys think about these in the comments section today we've seen a whole lot of things like how you can get things started up to how you can troubleshoot sending stuff previewing animations creating your own retargeting and also working with a control rig that exists with this new add-on or this pretty cool addon the guys at epic games has actually made available for everyone so tell me what you guys think about this in the comment section and of course if you like this video or you learn something from this you can go ahead and give it a like and don't forget to share with a friend and if you're new here it's going to be amazing for you to hit the subscribe button and also turn on notifications so that you don't miss the next video or the next update and until i see you guys again with a tutorial update free friday tutorial tuesday tips and tricks things like this peace

Channel: askNK

Views: 95,563

Keywords: unreal engine, epic games, game engine, game development, epic games gta 5, game dev, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 4, unreal engine 4 tutorial, marketplace, unreal engine free assets, substance painter 2019.1, blender live link, blender addon, blender to unreal, blender for unreal, blender tutorial, blender guru, unreal live link, live link, nvidia rtx, blender tutorial beginner, blender tutorial 2.8, blender, blender animation

Id: WQi5SVikuGE

Length: 31min 36sec (1896 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020