How to Import BLENDER FILES to Unreal Engine!

what's up guys justin here with the realtimeessentials.com so in today's video i'm going to talk about how to import blender files quickly into unreal engine let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so in order to import blender files in unreal engine the first thing we need to do is we need to make sure that we're set up with the blender add-ons for unreal engine there's a blog post which i will link to in the notes down below that kind of walks you through this and so the first thing that's kind of tricky about this is you need to make sure that you actually download the add-ons themselves so there's actually two add-ons in here we're going to focus on the first one there's a send unreal add-on there's also an unreal engine to rigify add-on which we can look at but we're not going to worry too much about in this video we want to focus today on getting our blender models into unreal engine so the first thing you need to understand is there is a link in here to github which will link you to the add-on but you need to make sure that you log into your epic games account and connect it to your github account before you do this otherwise it's not going to work it's going to give you an error message that looks something like this which is really frustrating by the way so first thing you need to do is you need to log into your epic games account so you can go up to the upper right hand corner of the page click on the button for sign in once you're logged in you want to go up into your account go into the personal section and you want to go down to connections and so within connections there's an option in here for accounts and you want to go down to the option for github and click on the option for connect account when you do that what that's going to do is that's going to allow you to connect to your github account so then we're going to click on link account it's going to ask you for authorization you're going to click on the button for authorized epic games and you do want to make sure that you've actually logged into a github account as well so what that's gonna do is that's gonna connect this and then you can go over into github on that link all right so then what's going to happen is you're going to get an email that says epic game says enjoy or epic team admin has invited you to join the epic games organization you can click on the join button and that's going to give you access you can also go to the epic games github page and there should be an invite at the top of the page you can click on to accept as well but once you do that that's going to give you access to the actual blender tools itself so now we finally got into the folder where we can access the blender tools add-on all right so then you want to go down and download the newest zip files you just want to click on the download button right here and we want send unreal right here so we're going to click on this and we want to download the zip file so we're going to click on the zip file and we're going to download that all right so remember since this is a zip file we can just go to our edit preferences in blender and we can install this as an add-on so we're going to go into our assets file we're going to find that zip file and we're going to install it notice how now we get this option in here for pipeline send to unreal so basically what it says is that's going to send that to unreal engine and so we're just going to check the box to enable this and we're not going to worry too much about the preferences right now let's jump over into unreal engine real quick okay so a couple steps that you need to follow um just to make sure that everything is is enabled the way that it should be so you need to make sure you go into your plugins and you want to make sure that you've enabled python editor script plugin right here make sure that is enabled and you also want to make sure editor scripting utilities is enabled those are enabled by default for me but you need to make sure those are enabled so this is going to work and then once you've done that you also need to go into your project settings and you need to scroll down into the plugins section under python right here make sure you've checked the box for enable remote execution so you you shouldn't so once you do this it's already set up so it sounds complicated but it's really not just make sure this box is checked well once you're done with that and you have an unreal engine level open then you can go back into blender and create a file or create an object so what i'm going to do is i'm going to do a shift a and we'll just add a we'll go ahead and add a suzanne right here i'm going to go ahead and and rename that test zero one but notice how once you enable the add-on there's an option up here for pipeline which is gonna allow you to export things to unreal engine now the problem right now is if you're to do a pipeline export send to unreal this isn't going to work the reason why is because it's only going to export things that are in these folders right here or these collections that were created when you enabled the add-on so what we need to do is for example we want to export the test01 mesh to unreal engine so what we're going to do is we're going to drag that into the mesh folder right here so one other thing we want to do before we do this is let's add a simple material to this so i'm just going to go into my shader editor we'll just add like a blue material to the suzanne right here and we'll go ahead and we'll do a subdivision surface modifier to this as well just to make it smoother we're going to apply that and we're going to call it good so now if we take our test01 which is inside of our mesh folder and we do a pipeline export send to unreal what that's going to do is that's going to send this object to unreal engine and so if i go over into unreal engine notice how it tells me there's no smoothing group information i'm not going to worry about that but notice how now if i look inside of my content folder it created an untitled category untitled asset folder notice how my test01 model is in here which is my monkey mesh my suzanne mesh and then it also created a material right here which it's applied to this object so you can see how bringing that into unreal engine is really easy all right so one thing i will note about this that i cannot figure out maybe one of you knows if i was to re-export this so if i have to change this material and re-export it like this so if i was to do a pipeline export send to unreal it doesn't actually change anything in this file right here so even if i was to right click on this and do a re-import of this asset right here it won't re-import the asset with a new material and i'm not really a hundred percent sure why so if i right click on this for example and i go to open source location i can see how and i had to redo this but i can see how there's a new fbx that's created in here with that new material but i can't get it to reload inside of unreal engine and i can't delete it out either so if i delete this and then try to delete out the file it tells me that there's a memory reference to it so for right now i cannot figure out how to get this to update with new materials later on i just cannot sort that out so since i haven't been able to figure out how to um get these changes to update in unreal engine what i've been doing instead is i just duplicate my object for right now so i would just call this something like test03 and then i'll just export it again so let's do a pipeline send to unreal and then it comes into the folder with the new materials so if anyone has a better way of doing that feel free to leave a comment down below and let me know this is still incredibly helpful to me but it is a little bit clunky getting your changes over to unreal engine and so let's say that we wanted to export a different kind of object so let's say we wanted to create a cube and let's say we wanted to create like a stone wall or something like that so we'll export it this way we'll scale it on the z axis and we'll go ahead and jump over to the shader editor and we'll create a quick material so i'm just going to create a principled vsdf material and we'll just create a quick material that's uv mapped in here and we'll go ahead and export this object so we're just going to call it brick wall we'll go ahead and drag that into our meshes folder take our test03 back out of our meshes folder and i'm going to go ahead and export that to unreal engine so for whatever reason this should work so it should come into unreal engine with the materials applied to it so if you look at this right here it's going to have the materials applied to it with the normal maps and everything else so that should work some materials don't work though so for example if i was to do this again with a new wall so we'll call it brickwall001 is fine and so let's say i was to apply a wood material and this is one of the wood materials that came out of the asset browser or the asset diorama from the blender asset browser tutorial whoops i applied that to the wrong wall but if i was to export this brick wall right here so do a pipeline export send to unreal and this is a different wall but this one with the wood texture for whatever reason when i bring that one in so my second wall the material doesn't work so i'm not 100 sure what drives materials working or not working but you might try if you export a material and it doesn't work you might just try a different material so i think there may be some more advanced functions inside of the material that was set up by blender here so there's some more complex stuff in here for sure so just be aware that your simpler pbr materials will probably work make sure that you uv map them but some of your more complex materials you may have to try something else that's just going to be kind of a trial and error process for you and so one thing one other thing that i do want to know when you're exporting this is when you go to your pipeline and you do an export there's an advanced dialogue that you're going to want to go into make sure that you check the option for use object origin if you don't use the object origin what it's going to do is it's going to export your object using the world origin so let's say for example that i was to take this diamond drag it into the mesh settings right here and then import it without having that option checked so if i don't have use object origin checked and i'm going to go ahead and click on ok in here if i don't have that checked then my object origin is going to be way over here right so it's going to use the the world origin as the origin for your object so now if i jump over into unreal engine and drag that diamond in notice how the actual diamond itself is going to be like way off of the actual origin itself so in order to fix that just make sure when you export your objects make sure that you have gun in your pipeline export advanced make sure that you've checked the option for use object origin that's going to make your life a lot easier inside of unreal engine all right so i know that seems a little bit complicated once you get it set up it actually works pretty good the one thing i haven't been able to figure out is that reimporting of materials so if you guys have any tips on that leave them in the comments down below if you have any questions leave them in the comments down below as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and i will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The RealTime Essentials

Views: 15,232

Keywords: unity, unity software, unity 3d, unity 2020, unity 2021, unreal engine, unreal engine blender, unreal engine blender import, unreal engine model import, unreal engine blender add-on, unreal engine blender plugin

Id: TVwoVo0EFdo

Length: 11min 5sec (665 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 22 2022