Blender to Unreal Workflow || 5 Steps for importing Cars

so this tutorial we will learn how to import models from blender to unreal engine in a very quick and easy way so it will serve like a really good foundation for getting to know unreal engine and learning the software especially if you're a blender user but hey let's just get right into it so the first thing you have to take care of when you're going to import a model from blender to unreal engine is to prepare your model inside blender so you might think that for unreal engine for a game engine you have to have very few polygons to be able to render it in real time that's actually not the case so the amount of polygon is not usually the problem the problem is the draw calls to show you this model was the one i used for the project and you can see it's actually pretty high poly so i used more poles in the front because i needed it because of the reflections they didn't look so nice there and if you use too few pulleys for a car you will never get good reflections you have to have a decent amount of polygons before it looks good what i did however to optimize for unreal engine is to combine a lot of the meshes so for every like i mentioned for every object you will have a draw call so that means if you have 1 000 objects you will have 1 000 draw holes but a lot of those octave objects can probably be combined into one mesh and then you will like just skip a lot of rock holes and that is really good for the performance however if you have an object with five different materials then unreal engine has to go in and make five draw calls each one draw call for each material so you have to keep that in mind too that also means that often it's a good idea to combine meshes with the same material so let me give you an example here so for for this car i have a an object called block geometry this is basically a lot of black geometry if you see here it's like the stuff inside the wheel and things like this and all that has the same material right now i have a lot of materials here but that's just because i haven't used reduced all the ones i i don't use this means this object will only take one draw call which is super performant super good for performance another thing that this mesh does is that it actually fixes a problem that you have in real time engines that you won't have in a normal ray tracer or inside blender and that is the back facing culling so the way blender works if you add a blade then you will be able to see it from both directions it's totally fine like why would you not right but if you go into blender and then disable or enable backface calling then you can see how the back face just disappears and this is how unreal engine works because if you have to calculate both sides of the object it actually takes more performance because of that then you will have to just do a quick test in blender what you can do is let me just hide this block geo then you can see what the problem is if you look through here you can actually see through the mesh and that's super weird because the background out there is like yeah it shouldn't be there it should be blocked um and if you want to test this really quickly then just go to this tab up here and click face orientation and then you can turn this back on you see everything that's red will be rendered wrong inside unreal engine you can see even here there's a problem there's even a hole here that you'll be able to see even if it could render the back faces so that's why i usually make a block geometry mesh it's just a very quick mesh done with a lot of planes and quick modeling because it doesn't have to look look nice it just has to cover all these red spots more or less and there's a little bit of see-through here but you probably won't notice it in the film so those are some important things another thing is that the textures that you're using are also very important especially if you take your video memory into account so don't go much over 4k in general if you go from 4k to 8k that means you'll have four times as much video maybe video memory spent on that one texture and you might think that you can just compress the textures but that's not how it works because unreal engine and actually also blender has to read the textures uncompressed into the video memory that means that if you have too much too many textures unreligion just won't render the same goes for the resolution if you make a bigger resolution render if you want to render everything in 4k you have to have a lot of video memory free to be able to do that in cycles it doesn't really matter because the resolution doesn't depend on the doesn't take more video memory but in unreal engine it does so there are a few things you have to be aware of in relation to performance but most importantly the geometry is not the amount of polygons it's not the most important the most important is the draw calls keep them low so keep a few objects in there and use a lot of instancing we'll get into that later and then the last one is backface calling just make sure that you don't have these see-through areas in your mesh when you import it so a good workflow to have inside unveil engine is to kind of split your objects into three main categories the first category is what is known as a prop so you might know this from video games or from prop on or whatever proponents or props are basically just objects that can be scattered around your scene so this here is an object from megascans from the kwiksel library and it's it it can be scattered maybe five times throughout the scene in different places because this one can basically be any size any rotation doesn't matter it's not specific it doesn't have to have a specific placement in the scene then there is the set object so the set is kind of things that has to have a certain location or a certain rotation or something in the scene this could be if you for instance the road in my render was a set because i knew that that one had to be under the car in a specific location otherwise it wouldn't it wouldn't make sense it's like the big piece right the same if you have a room then the room would be the set like imagine a living room with couches and furniture and everything then the walls with the room would be the set because they kind of have a specific location you'll probably set this up inside blender and then your props will be the chairs and the tables and the couches and everything else and the plants but nevertheless this is kind of the the outline the idea and you don't have to follow this rule but oftentimes it's really good to think of it like this think of it like this you have sets and you have props and probably also a hero object which is kind of its own thing so now we have everything set up inside blender i just made some very quick materials here they won't be exported entirely into unreal engine but we will have the albedo color in unreal engine so we can see what kind of color everything should be and that's really nice to have another thing is that i also have all the material slots ready so i don't have to fix that in unreal engine i already know that here we'll have aluminium on this piece here and here i will have car pain and aluminium and windows and car paint a secondary car paint collar and tires the tires actually doesn't make sense i don't think it's supposed to be there so to export to unreal engine there is a really cool add-on made by epic games which just does that does which does this automatically for you so you have to download the add-on and it's a bit cumbersome to get it because you have to get it from github from the official github and you have to sign up and be in and get like an invitation to join their github it's all free and it's not it's not limited to a certain amount of people but it just takes some time to get it to work um but once you have the the add-on downloaded you just go and install it in blender like any other add-on and then you enable it it's called send to unreal when you've done that all you have to do is actually just launch unreal engine and when you have done that just click pipeline export and send to unreal so i set up a shortcut for this just to make it easier but let me just open unreal engine so you can see how it works so i already went ahead and set up a blank project you don't have to add any specific starter content if you want to you can do that but just be aware that the first time you're launching a new project unreal has to compile shaders which we're not used to in blender either maybe a bit in eevee but this can take a long time so just expect that it will probably take half an hour maybe for the first launch when we're inside unreal engine there are a few things we have to check right now i'm in unreal engine 5 but the plugin works both with unreal engine 5 and unreal engine 4. so just go ahead and check that the plug-in python python it is a script plugin is enabled and also it is just scripting utilities is enabled these might be enabled by default but just check it if something is not working then afterwards you have to go into the project settings and then search for python and enable this checkbox here which is called enable remote execution this basically allows blender to just send day's head to unreal so this is great everything's set up now and we're ready to just import so what we do is just drop the meshes that we want to export into the mesh folder the mesh collection so this mesh collection is automatically generated by the add-on so you just drop all the meshes you want to export in here and then you either click your shortcut or go to the menu pipeline export and send to unreal now it might look like blender actually crashed but it didn't depending on how big your your export is blender is actually exporting an fbx in the background and just loading that into unreal afterwards but this can take some time and if blender does this don't worry just give it a minute to calculate and then check back later and see if it exported properly so you will see inside unreal engine that it starts to do this importing and then it goes through all your objects okay so the import finished and i can see we have some issues here usually these don't really matter so much to me they haven't been a problem this just means that some of the normals in some of the uh tangents are very small that's probably because i have some meshes with with geometry which is very close to each other like two vertices that are very close to each other an unreal engine might not be able to view that or to show that properly but i haven't found that to be an issue for me the same with the smoothing groups usually it works when i export as so i would just ignore these so now you can see that nothing really changed inside unreal engine we have no model here and that's because right now it's located in the untitled category inside on title assets so in here you can see you have all the objects from blender and you can start to control click all of them the the objects that we want to put into our scene not grid we don't need that or maybe we do and just drag it into a scene and there you go there you have the model from blender let's just turn it around here and now unreal engine again it's just combining compiling the shaders that is imported from blender and we'll check back when it's done now let's just go over how you can update or re-export stuff from blender to unreal engine because often you realize that you need to change something when you get it into on religion and that's where the add-on is really cool because it makes this process very easy just make sure you don't change object names along the way because then unreal gets confused so you have to keep the naming convention and that's also why it's good to find good names in the beginning and then stick to those names also by the way if you want to change this directory here what you need to do is to go into your add-on preferences under export no under paths and then change the path here so this could be blender blender assets and then mclaren car or something like that and then it will import it into unreal engine within those folders inside on religion so let's say we wanted to add the change to the wheels so what we can do if you want to add an object is to just take our objects here which are already blender and drop them directly into the mesh collection now you can see they appear here and that's great this is all we have to do inside blender what i will do just to save some time is to actually hide all the other objects because i don't or move them to another collection because we don't need to import all the other objects again we already did that and so i'll just select these invert the selection and drop all this to the hidden folder now let's just go ahead again and click export and send to unreal and back in onward we can see that our stuff has been imported and we can drop in go in here and find our chains they are here and drop them into the scene so right now they are located in the wrong place and uh but that's very easy to fix because you can see all our objects are exported with their origin point at the center of the scene so this just means that we have to go into our body and actually let's just put all the other geometry under the body this will make it much easier for us to manage and later on we could go ahead and make a blueprint for the car which is something you would often do with an hero with a hero object because then you can add animations you can add a skeleton even if you if you want to do that but that's for another day so now let's take our change and also drop them inside here and just zero out the transform here now they also need to be zeroed out in the rotation and then they should match and they do that's perfect so this is how you import objects afterwards but what if we want to actually change something which is inside the mesh that is already in here so that's also pretty easy to do let's just go back to blender and let's drop these back into the hidden folder because we won't need to export them again let's get the body and the detail and put it back here so i want to take the windscreen wipers and just put it up because that's maybe what i wanted to to do in this scene now just a little tip on how to do something rotating something quickly inside blender if you need a very specific axis so we want to rotate these windscreen wipers up here so they are kind of like at their up position so we can use the 3d cursor to do this first you have to click the 3d cursor here and just make sure that inside the tool and active tool you have picked geometry as the orientation because then it will align to the geometry so let's put this 3d cursor here and see if the looks like the orientation would fit and change the transfer of argument transform orientation from global to cursor and pick the 3d curse as the pivot point now we can rotate around the z-axis of the 3d cursor and this should be should be working let's see it's not working entirely but let's just give it a little bit of rotation here as well and i think that's uh that's that's decent enough for the for this example so let's get rid of the body again because we don't really need that that was just for a reference and we only need to re-export this part here so let's just go ahead and we don't even have to select it it just has to be in the mesh folder and click select or click pipeline export send to unreal and there you go then we can see that our windscreen wiper is now intersecting the windscreen and is looking kind of ridiculous but it at least worked we can very easily re-import and update our mesh if needed this workflow is really cool because you can so easily just hop jump back into blender and do some changes and then go back into unreal and see that the model is updated there so one thing which is also really cool about unreal engine is that it has some kind of automatic instancing so all the objects you have here when you drag them into the scene another time it's kind of instancing them so it's like if you are using blender and you use the the same mesh data for multiple objects so this means that if you have a rock in one in a folder here for for instance a rock asset from mega scans you can put it multiple places in your scene it will take a bit more performance but it will be instanced like we know from blender so i went ahead and added some few preset materials to our model and just to show kind of like how unreal engine works so this is running in unreal engine 5 um but not with lumen because lumen has a tendency to not do the reflection the same way so if we go in here into the project settings you can search for reflection and you can switch it here from raytrace to lumen and you can see it feels like lumen is doing some kind of reflection here that is screen spaced since when this yellow stuff is outside the screen space then it appear it disappears in the reflection this is really sad because that means that the reflections won't be accurate it looks like it has some kind of fallback but this might not might just be because i'm using lumen wrong but i've also heard other people talking about that lumen is not the best solution for reflections so this here still needs a lot of working see how the reflections are very wobbly that's because a lot of settings inside unreal engine are very optimized and they do not work so well with automotive rendering because it has to do with very sharp reflections and very clear surfaces but what i would suggest you do is to watch the video which will appear up here somewhere and it's from unreal or from the guys at unreal engine from epic games where they go over how to render cars inside unreal engine they have a super good tutorial where they go through all these technical things you need to know there are a lot of console variables that's basically console commands here you have to write and activate to actually make your car look good inside unreal engine it's kind of a shame but it's because it's not made for it's not built for making cars you can do it but it's more like made for video games in general so one last thing is that you might want to actually go back to unreal engine 4 for a card project right now in my experience at least because a lot of the things worked very well in uv4 and in ue5 it might not work the same way anymore but do some text testing and do some research now you at least know how to import models from blender to unreal engine and how easy it is to actually get started doing that and you can play around and try out different things and check out some really good content that unreal engine has online on how to learn all these extra things there is a lot of knowledge to get there [Music] so rtmg the real-time motion graphics caused by mitch cenov it's aimed at motion designers and visual artists who want to learn about new techniques to quickly generate ideas and produce great looking renders at breakneck speed so i went through this course myself and i found so many small golden nuggets of tips and tricks in here even just the way that mitch sets up blender made me rethink my own workflow so i would recommend this course to anybody who is interested in motion design or just want to be more creative in their workflows check the description for the link along with the coupon code for the early birds you will get 30 off until the 17th of june but even after that you can still grab a 15 discount code when using the link so i hope you feel a bit more comfortable now jumping into unreal engine especially if you're using blender if you haven't seen it already you can go check out my podcast in the first episode i talked to one of my friends about a short film that he recently published i created the podcast because i really enjoyed listening to conversations myself about cg and i feel like there's not enough of them out there so the idea is it's a cg square where you can go and learn from other people and just have nice conversations with other artists and hear what they're up to but hey that was all have a nice day and i hope to see you in the next one you

Channel: Daniel Vesterbaek

Views: 388,553

Keywords: Blender To Unreal, Import Blender into unreal, Export From Blender to Unreal, Blender Transfer to Unreal, UE5, UE4, 3D Animtion, Unreal Engine, Blender, Beginner, Easy, Quick, Simple, Steps, Blender to UE4, Blender to UE5, Export Car to UE4, Blender car to Unreal Engine, car, tutorial, guide, help, learning, animation, cg, 3d, racing, vehicle, race, cgi, blender, cycles, eevee, motion graphics, lesson, realistic, shading, materials, realism, modeling, Workflow, Workflow tutorial, Blender to Unreal Workflow

Id: 8YOizxwI8xA

Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021