Exporting Unreal 5 Assets to Blender

all right welcome back uh we're going to talk about unreal asses today and importing them into blender so you can use them anywhere unreal has a lot on really swell assets for free if you go over to the marketplace here and then click on free you can browse all this stuff is for free and a lot of the stuff isn't too expensive for the work you get out of it actually but the thing is if you want to use these assets and anything besides the Unreal Engine then it's going to have to undergo some sort of transformation process because of unreal's proprietary format now this has been done several times before with fbx but that's kind of a pain because you usually have to end up reassigning the materials we're going to skip through that with the secret sauce being gltf is now very straightforward so we're going to go to the library you can see I've already downloaded that one that Japanese building asset here I've created an empty sandbox scene which is just a default scene in unreal and this is it if you go down to the content drawer you can see the files of the project I'm going to open a Content browser right here that way we can see everything so going back to here we're going to add to project pick the project by the way if you're trying to import this asset into a project whose version doesn't match you can hit show all projects I don't have any others but say you had installed 5.2 preview which is available now you can try and get it in there and you know it'll probably warn you that said we'll just add this to project and you can see it working down here there we go it's in the project now and we can confirm that now you see this folder here has been added to this project so like most assets there's a nice demo scene to this one I'm going to go here and just double click on that and that loads it in very nice so we're going to check this building out right here we're going to get this building into blender something to note is if you went to the other individual meshes you could do the same thing with them if you wanted to build something in blender as opposed to doing it like this but we're going to export the building because that'll be a nice demonstration so over here on the right you'll see that this has already been grouped for you like the buildings are a group actor and that's unreals kind of equivalent to a collection I think so if you were to click on this you know it selects all the actors in that group actors just I think is unreal's way of saying object but there's probably more to it anyway if you wanted to do that yourself and it were not already done or you were doing some regrouping after you select the items that you want in a group you can go up to tools and then go down to merge actors right here and that would merge it into a single mesh that you could export so we've selected this building I'm going to go to export selected and we're going to create a folder for the asset because it's going to have a bunch of files of course and let's just name this and we don't want fbx we want gltf now one thing you want to make sure you pick the first gltf not the binary the difference is the binary is going to have everything packed into UBS binary and this format will just export the textures separately as images which will allow blender to keep them separate and map everything for you when you import it that's what's so awesome about this and also obviously if you wanted to edit the textures themselves this would make it straightforward so we're going to pick that format save and this pops up for you I don't think we need a preview mesh so I'm going to uncheck that the rest of this I just leave okay and it's giving us a few warnings here that's one thing that's always going to be the case if unreal has a proprietary format there might be some features to the format that aren't necessarily perfectly translatable this is just saying you know maybe you want to recompute normals we know we can do that in blender nothing major here so I'm just going to close that and here's the folder it extracted to so you can see what it's done is it's exported the gltf files here and here we go all those nice textures separately so that way we can mess with them and map them as we please so we're going to import that into blender let's open up blender all right let's get rid of the default Cube just because it's blender import gltf and then we're going to navigate to that folder which is here and just pick that gltf file import there we go so fbx will get you this far but the nice thing here is the textures are already mapped we can show that by going to material here and voila and let's just take a look at some of those so we can see over here in the Shader editor whatever one's selected over here you can see it's mapping to those textures that we saw in that folder and you can do whatever you want so one thing that's worth mentioning up here is that it does not import them as a collection but that's very minor I believe you can just delete this this is that group actor which is I believe the unreal object that was holding the group you can just delete that because it's specific to Unreal and I would typically just add a new collection just name it after whatever and then just put all of the meshes that you just imported into that collection and that'll keep it organized especially when you got a lot of objects like this so we're just going to drag those in here and there you go now you've got it all organized as well so one other thing just to demonstrate I'm going to switch this over to Cycles so we get a little better representation and to do that first I'm going to add some lights so for that I'm just going to add a plain no typical stuff here material with an emission on it that'll work you know work much better for Cycles pick the light color something a little Sunny sunset-ish would be fitting and then up the emission strength whatever and I'm going to quickly put a few of these around just to give it some three-point lighting not going to go crazy with it okay so now that we've got the lights in place then the Cycles will actually look decent so I'm going to switch to cycles and then to the render preview and there we go up the strength here for the lights if we want to get a little more and you know let's just do a render so we can see it and there we go pretty sweet

Channel: NuGameDev

Views: 3,258

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Id: GY4GeIzlTAE

Length: 6min 24sec (384 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 16 2023