How to use Blender with UE5 - Tutorial

all right in this video i'm gonna show you how you can do all the export between blender and unreal and cover most of the trick i find over time so i hope you're gonna like it so basically those stuff was more of a bunch of notes for me and information i want to use personally but i thought maybe some people would be interested to know how those things work so you have an example of a finnish mushroom moving around here and all the step all the exploration and different potential things we can face during the export between blender and unreal so there's many sections so you can you don't have to watch the world video because it's pretty long and i'm not very fast or very efficient to explain but again it's more notes for myself but hope you can enjoy it all right so let's start that so we're gonna use blender 2.9 3.1 at the moment of recording this okay first thing delete the cube here we go now we're gonna create i like to do let's do a mushroom yeah let's go for that mushroom we're gonna use very simple way to do that using simple curve i'm gonna move this aside uh maybe adding a modifier a screw fire like this on x increase a little bit the resolution and then we're gonna start playing with the root of the mushroom as you can see now we can create kind of a funny shape okay now let's let's add another curve uh and this time we're gonna work on again we're gonna just flip this 90 degree in the y and we're gonna do we're gonna do the head of the mushroom crease a little bit just to have a better resolution [Music] we got our mushroom okay so the the thing we're gonna do is just to join ctrl g so we make one mesh and we're gonna call this the shroom and export that on fbx and the shroom and you give it a name it's gonna be called shroom shroom one because we're gonna do a couple of them so i'm gonna purposely leave most of the setup by default so we're gonna see what's wrong uh unreal engine and we're gonna fix that speaking of of it uh let's start real engine early access five we're gonna use first person shooter that's kind of cool we're gonna call the project name shroom blender create that first thing we're going to do is we're going to create a folder to work we're going to call this the shroom folder let's start to import our first mushroom and that's we just import the fbx open it and again we're going to leave everything by default and see what's happened and port all and boom we get the first very common mistake no smoothing group information was found in the fbx scene how do we fix this super simple let's close that delete this guy because he's not good uh and we're just gonna fix this by when we do the export we have to choose in the geometry the smoothing using face instead and then do the export again export we overwrite the number one that's not a big deal import and now the error will be gone there we go let's do this import all boom the error it's fine but we we're gonna have phase two newton so if i drag this shroom and my scene you're gonna notice a first thing one thing is really weird it's like it's a transparent mushroom so how do we uh how do we fix that transparency very simple we have to do is we take the object and convert that object to a mesh really important the other thing we're gonna do now is we're gonna go in edit mode and then we can see all the vertices of our mesh and we're gonna activate the normal view like this and we're gonna turn it like to one just like you can see all those blue lines are kind of inside so that's the problems very simple way to fix that you select your object and you go to mesh normal and you do a flip and now your normal are all going outside so perfect so let's let's do an export with this fbx so we're gonna call this number two like that export import number two open import all and there we go or mesh now it's look more normal let's create a material and or shroom one like this we try to apply the material on this guy doesn't work but if we apply it on this guy it works all right so this second bug is now fixed third bug now if we look at this guy it's kind of weird that if we apply rotation it's it's gonna rotate but it's not necessarily from the right spot you know the the access it's not at the right space so easy way to fix that you go there let's remove those guys we don't want to see this put us on the side view number one and let's grab g and z and let's move this a little bit grab z let's move this a little bit up that's it and now do export fbx and now we're gonna call this shroom number three export an import shroom number three open import all shroom number three can see now so my guy is now having his axes at the base so if we put the so this guy is accesses here and this guy's access is here so very convenient so that's the first step okay so i think we can say this mushroom is a good so let's do a bit of a cleanup right now okay now we're gonna work with the the material um it's not really a bug but it's something take me a little bit times to figure out so what i would like to have now is to have two different material one for the head and one for for the base of the mushroom unfortunately right now as you can see there's only one material slot available for that so let's do this in blender create a new material head like that and we're gonna just put it a nice reddish color like this be sure to be on the edit mode control l so the head is all selected so typically you select the group of mesh you wanna associate to a specific material you assign it and then we're gonna do the same stuff for the other one so we're gonna add another we're gonna emit the body like that buddy and this guy we're just gonna leave it white that's gonna be perfect so ctrl l like this and we're just going to analysis assign this daram so we have our two material associated in blender we can export this fbx and we're going to call this of course mushroom four because it's the fourth one export leave it as is and we're gonna import now the mushroom number four the thing you have to be sure is to look at the material import method and create new material be sure this is selected import all and now as you can see we have the body and the head material be selected we can put now our new mushroom next to the other one and this guy has two materials slot and they're perfectly created so they have a default color it's all clean this is the trick for the material okay now we're going to explore another really important aspect with blender and unreal engine is the uv uv is the information that display all your texture aren't being displayed on your on your mesh see how this thing really impacts the look of the mesh so i'm going to modify the the material i'm going to add a texture sample so we can have a better id uh let's change this to put something like uh pebbles so i'm gonna replace the red color with those guys so basically my material must be look like those little bevels so that's what i'm expecting happen to my mushroom but unfortunately when we look at it it doesn't look like right at all so you can see here it's it's weirdly distributed and the reason for the reason for that is my uv was not properly unwrapped so let's let's let's do this here so there's a very nice editing mode for the uv on blend and blender so you put this like that select all and then we can see what's what's the issue here so my mesh was created with the with curve and it doesn't really fit this the space for for the uv so let's unwrap this better in a better way so there's different techniques so you can unwrap this like just using unwrap and it's create kind of a funny shape like that or uh one thing you can use a projection view with bounds like this which is not bad i mean if i go hop like this and i do the same stuff projection from view with bounds it's it's interesting but i mean the the real way to do that is to simply use steam and put this on edit edge select loop edge loop and then you right click this and then you say you do a mark steam you do the same with the other part of the mesh select loop like this and mark steam so basically now you cut your mushroom somehow so and we're gonna do a uv unwrap uv rap and then you can see now there's a kind of a more interesting way to distribute your uv map so now let's let's do an export fbx we're gonna call this mushroom five so now we're gonna import open this import all so automatically as you can see unreal engine capture the previous material and just now fix automatically the the problem with the uv so we have a better uv mapping right here okay now i would like to push a little bit more the material aspect from the base so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna use another texture sample it's gonna be the same uh i'm gonna use the same pebbles than the other ones so we can see a little bit of uh evolution between those so i'm putting this i'm gonna change the color just to help us to see the difference multiply that so just it's a quick and dirty uh for the base so now you can you can have a little bit view of so the mushroom the base have also another texture so what about i would like to have a different uv and a different tiling for dual mesh the head versus the body so one way to do that will be to create two different uv inside of my own mesh so right now if i look at the uv map i only have one uv map index so i'm gonna add another one i'm gonna call this base and what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna select my base here and i'm gonna scale it to full fit the space of the uv so now if i look at this one i'm gonna take this one though for the top grab i'm just gonna move it aside like this so this uv map now so now this uv map is mostly concentrated with the base and i'm gonna do similar stuff but with the the head instead quick so now i have two uv map so what's gonna happen so i'm gonna export that again for unreal engine so i'm gonna use now number six so it's gonna be a new mushroom import my number six and i'm just gonna put it next to it right away we can see there's a difference because i kind of fix the hedge here so it's less apparent but i'm i'm working now with a mesh that have two uv channels so let's see this in more detail so if i look at it i can see now there's a uv channel zero which is the one i was just created and uv channel one that's the one and there's also uv channel two which is it's mostly managed by unreal engine to distribute the light on your mesh but that doesn't matter here so what i'm gonna do now with this information is i can change the coordinate specifically for that material how i can do this i'm going to use a coordinate i'm going to use a texture coordinate like this i'm going to create two parameters call this one v-tiling put number one another one u-titling i bend those guys together and then multiply this with my coordinate here plug this to my uv save that and it's always better to use an instance of a material so create instance and change this for body instance now i can go here and of course i can do tiling and color change so i can change the tiling of my mesh here but you may notice it's it's kind of similar to this one so just to increase the resolution of that i'm going to my buddy here and i'm going to use the channel which is associated to my new uv so there's a coordinate here so this one will correspond to 0 right now close that and let's check our shroom 6 uv channel 0 so that's the one so basically this is not the channel i want to work with i want to work with this channel which is typically made for body mushroom so let's go fix that going here i'm going to press one so i change my channel now save and now it's become more more customized for the base of my mushroom as you can see i can i can play again with eileen for sure so i can put this back to zero but it's a completely different resolution so it's a different uv map which is can be really useful if you design your mesh with different texture or different uv and mine so let's take advantage of those uv map and we're going to create a better texture and a better look for a mushroom than what we are right now because to be honest this is this is pretty ugly so let's try to create something a little bit more mushroomy so uh important thing is you have to select the right uv map for your painting so i'm gonna do this like that so i'm gonna start with the add like this um i'm picking this and i'm gonna go to my head and i'm gonna create a section here where i can see my shade editor like that and i'm gonna add the image texture like this i'm gonna create a new one i'm gonna call this head texture be sure you you're creating different naming convention because it can create some issue with the unreal if you use always the the same the same the same name main convention so here multiply by two this guy as well i'm gonna put it by default uh red so let's move this we're gonna create a reddish like this like this color there we go so now we have our texture just appear right there so we connect the color with the base color here and we should now having our mushroom ready there we go so our mushroom now head of the mushroom is red let's start painting this for a better look so go to texture paint i'm going to create like little white dot on my mushroom like the magic mushroom everybody knows so let's save this image now if you click here you see there's a little asterisk save as head texture just save that image so eventually unreal will be able to export that import that sorry now let's do the body the body part and be sure you always work with the right uv so i'm just going to switch to this uv guy now i'm going to create same new texture image texture like that i'm going to create this it's going to be pretty body texture put it more white like that okay there we go so it looks it's a little bit funny because in in blender i didn't find the best way to swipe between v and maps and stuff like that so anyway so it's kind of confusing it can be confusing for the 3d artist but let's let's try to work with this way instead and then we're going back to here buddy so we're gonna put like new texture so i'm gonna put like more brownish like that right i'm just gonna reduce the spread like this all right so now if i switch to head like this so we can see the head and now we can see the body now our body is being created so let's save that image it's really important if we want to have unreal engine to get the image let's do this and the other thing you have to be careful is to rename your material because if you don't looks what's going to happen so let's do an export like this and port this inside of unreal engine 7 open so even if you look for material create new mesh create new instance and import texture you click that it will not works it will kind of automatically associate to the previous texture we had in place so let's delete this and now let's fix this by just naming the material 7 here the body 7 there we go so be sure you save your texture where you want it to be like i'm going to save my texture here let's go to the other guy head save as i'm going to save it i don't want to say i want to save it on the right project here add texture save as so now i'm sure my two texture are in the same folder and i'm going to import everything so let's do this port fbx export like that now let's do an import open import all there we go so in order to this thing works be sure you have imported your text you have save your texture and it's imported properly so let's now drag and drop this guy here there we go so first thing you may notice is the head seems to be fine but the body is not so let's fix the body texture body texture where's the body texture here we go double click on that it's simply because i don't direct this to the right coordinate so texture coordinate so i'm going to plug this so as you remember if i look at my mushroom here that the uv i'm looking for is so that's the uv channel one for zero for the head and that's the uv channel one which is the body so this is what i want to fix so i'm gonna put here number one and then i'm gonna change my texture to the right place and there we go now i have my mushroom completed with this new texture which is a little bit nicer look more like a real mushroom but there's some stuff we can improve more now we're gonna try to make something a little bit more complicated um let's take the example of that mushroom i'm gonna replace the texture with the the pebbles material like that and as you can see right now there's kind of a kind of a shape to it which is a reflection so it's made mostly done by using as we're gonna see here it's using what we call normals so uh so they use a normal which is a kind of a special texture baked using high detail shape and it's applied on on the object so we're going to try to do this for our mushroom here so let's go back to blender i already prepare another mushroom which is i call here eye shroom which is a high resolution mushroom so it's basically the same mushroom but high resolution let's compare that x like that so i'm just going to put them side by side so now you see this mushroom have a little dump bump and stuff like that so if we look at the mesh itself this guy have way more resolutions i think i'm going to do it now i'm just going to add a little bit more texture to it so going in the sculpt mode so that's the way i did that so i just copy this one and i increase this using the meta the add modifier subdivision surface so i'm going to work now on the base so in order to change that i'm going to go in sculpt mode and i'm going to trace like a little shape like this all right so i just had a bunch of lines and details so we're gonna be able to see maybe something more interesting inside of unreal and now we're gonna do the baking process so basically baking process means we're gonna generate a normal map we're gonna take all the resolution of that high polygon and put it on the smaller polygon so in order to do that we have to pick and organize a bit the material of the smaller polygon so let's go on the small one here and we can add a first node which is a normal node to create a normal sorry a normal map so we're going to create a normal map like this and we're going to hook it to normal like this but to feed that normal map we need an image so we're going to generate another texture image texture image texture sorry like this and then we're gonna create a new one head texture normal head texture not the one i already created and really important here is to because by default when you create an image it says to color space rgb which is not what you want you use this when you want to do stuff like we did previously but now we want to create a normal so that's a non-color color texture and we're gonna just hook that right here like that okay so the material is now set to be baked so we're going to go now in the properties render properties a baking process happen only on cycle render so we have to pick the render the baking type we're going to do is a normal baking type like this and one thing really important to change specifically for unreal engine is the swizzles uh that it's a negative why so why why is that is probably there's something that i read it's probably because uh unreal engine versus a blender some use opengl and the other one use directx and they have different convention for that part so that's okay uh the other one is you have to select to active and then we're gonna create by default those value because i play with it before those value at zero so we're gonna we're gonna fix the extrusion and the max ray distance and one way to find that uh it's this part is can be an iterative part but just to save you time i already make a measurement here you take a measurement rule and you go on the side like this and you just try to figure out what's the height of it so here we have 0.29 here we have 0.5 so you look around your mesh and try to find some some very high levels so 0.4.5 so i think point five as an extrusion will be a right uh option in the max ray distance it's a parameters also you have to play it's the way the projection is happening so so we're going to create like like that so the very tricky part is to start the baking so the baking must start from the eye polygon and then you click to the smaller one like this so i click this one control and press right click mouse that's a one way to do this or you just be sure you select you see now i switch between ice room and shroom so i select the ice shroom and press shift and now i should click again on my mushroom and the shroom is selected so that's mean the baking will apply from the ice room to the smaller shroom so let's do this now let's start the baking so the first pass give us no result and and that's typically what happening is specifically when we have multiple uv we have to be careful with the uv mapping so because we generate to uv we need to change that and be sure we're looking at the right one and in my case i was looking at the the uv map base for the base of the mushroom like this part so we need to go there and select this guy instead and just to reinforce that for the export i'm gonna select the uv map and force the vector here like this so now i'm really sure i have my baking happen to the right place so let's do this again be sure the high shroom is selected and going to the shroom there we go so we get almost ready or mapping this area indicate kind of uh it's a bit maybe because my uv is a bit too stretchy it's hard for the mapping but we don't care i mean nobody's going to really look in this area so that's fine so we can consider the the normal done for the head of the mushroom now let's do this for the body let's select the body 7 which is the one for the mushroom now we're gonna do same thing we're gonna add normal map like this we're gonna hook this normal map nodes to the material here and then we're gonna create another texture image texture like this this time i'm gonna create a new one i'm gonna call it body normal texture really important color space select none color that's a common error apparently and we just hook that here and then we're going to use just to force the will thing uv i'm going to force the uv map like we do in unreal uv map so this guy it's the base like this i'm gonna hook my uv map here hook my uv map there like this so both uv map are supposed to be map at the right place and now just to be sure everything is fine i'm going to use now the base i'm going to visualize this guy like this so now again same prince principle i select the high mushroom and then the targeted mushroom is selected i'm going now on my render scene and i check everything is fine i'm gonna do a bake all right so i have a nice normal map being created so now i have to save both of those guy i'm going to save this in the same folder i do all my work shroom here body normal texture save that guy and i have to do the same with the body normal head texture save as same space same folder there we go it's just before doing this export i'm just going to change something for be more consistent with the mapping so i'm going to change the name body and head 7 if i remove this guy i can see my mapping it's been there so now i just want to export i don't want this guy i just want to export this guy so i'm going to do an export here fbx shroom 8 and i'm going to do select object only mesh other and be sure my smoothing is on face all right everything seems to be ok export now i'm going to go back i create my folder under shroom my credit folders room 8 import shroom 8 open so everything seems to be ok let's import that all right now this guy have a lot of information so let's see if we can fill the mushroom right away so already we can start to see the detail on my mushroom i'm gonna have to fix my body like this so as you can see my normal texture has been applied correctly my sample as well and now i'm gonna add a coordinate texture texture coordinate i'm gonna pick number one because i know this is the one i want i just modified the uv here just to force the right uv to both of them save there we go and now i got a more detailed mushroom there we go so it's more that's there's way more detail and it's a really interesting it's a really interesting look now and it doesn't cost that much in terms of resolution and performance so that's really interesting okay in terms of comparison let's do something a little bit more advanced and it's more specific to unreal engine five so we're gonna export the heavy mushroom which is this one here we're gonna hide this guy and we're just gonna do a file export fbx and that's gonna call number eight but i res like this i'm going to go here i'm going to create another subfolder hi res i'm gonna call this like this import so already we can see this object is way bigger than the other one so that's massive difference but let's try to import this anyway import all so you see now i have this mushroom which i have over three three thousand almost four hundred thousand uh triangles which is crazy you don't wanna you wanna play with something like that especially for a game if we compare this with this guy he's only have five thousand almost six thousand uh vertices so but just for fun we're going to import that and of course there's a high-res mushroom right there so is it better yeah it's interesting i mean it's it's it's better in terms of resolution but in term of of resource and draw calls and fps it's it's just a killer so let's okay but we don't we don't want to use such a big asset and or and or in our game so let's let's delete this we're going to import and stand and nanite version of that so now we're going to click build night so this is an important process during the import so if we click import so unreal engine now gonna process the the mushroom and make it more efficient for the game here we go so the nanite has been built so i can pull this out like this so the first thing you can see is the triangle is only 2 000 which is even less than this guy i'm gonna do a copy of this copy of this delete this i'm gonna delete this one too like this and we're gonna remove this because we don't need that right so we're going to do similar modification here so there's no normal for this one but there's a coordinate need to be adjust because the uv is on the channel number one again so we're just gonna change this like that there we go and we're gonna use this new texture i'm gonna apply this to this guy here whoops the opposite way this one is go there and this one is good there there we go so now we have our iris mushroom we don't need this obviously compared to the other one so there's a little bit of a difference here but in term of performance performance wise i think we playing with a nanite and it's way more efficient than the other one so the effect is quite similar but i will even say that of course if you look on the side you will see the effect it doesn't play that much you know it's always like a kind of a an effect but here the nanite of course is way better so the thing is with nanite is unfortunately as you can see when we did the import you cannot do a skeleton mesh with the nanite so if i just open and then if i want to do a skeleton mesh the nanite has got disabled so nanite is only for static mesh so this is something really important to understand but anyway that's interesting to see this guy is a really high-res and this this guy it's also iris so they basically look look alike a little bit but they have different uh different usage so this one will be this one will be able to animate it while this one have to stay static so if you're looking for very high detail static image i think you should go with nanite with unreal engine 5 otherwise you have to go with the old ways which is creating normal as we did in blender okay now i would like to push a little bit further the concept of the mushroom by adding some life in it by using skeleton mesh so but we're gonna build a skeleton mesh with animation and see how the mushroom can react with this so let's go to blender in blender we're gonna use the animation tab we're gonna look at our mushroom on the side so the first things to do is to avoid using the eye mesh mushroom because right now it's too high detail so it's not appropriate for an armature so we're gonna pick the other one the small one which have way less vertices which is more appropriate for this kind of work so let's start by adding an amateur single bone then we're gonna go here and show view display so we're gonna show the name of the bones and also we're gonna put it on the front so we're gonna select the bone go in edit mode grab z and we're gonna subdivide it uh to four so we're gonna have five bones like that's perfect so now we're gonna pick we're gonna select the mesh then shift p shift click the on the the bones and then control p to wait with automatic so this is the base to do so now what we're gonna check is how the weight paint is being distributed among the mesh so we can see the top bone zero one is quite nice number two two there's a little bit of association with the root i wanna remove that three four and zero so the way to do this is you go here edit mode so i'm gonna do a control l and i'm gonna remove this from bone one remove and bone to remove all right and then i'm gonna do the same with the cap and i'm gonna remove this from number three four and bone as a zero let's all right so now if we compare or whoops or wet paint like this it's more distributed so the one i was worried was more bone tree and bone two so that's all perfect they completely disassociated all right so now we have our proper bone structure so let's do an export and see how unreal can deal with this so so to do the export important go in object mode select the mushroom and be sure you have the world the whole thing selected so like this so i i just select the i just press the mushroom and shift press the the armature so i have the world thing selected do an export fbx so let's put this in our stream folder so i did some tests previously delete this we're gonna use a new naming convention it's gonna be number 11. let's do this and call it rig at the end now what do we want to do in terms of export so be sure you click select active the way i did that i select the two armature in the mesh i'm gonna select armature and mesh also in term of geometry always put this face and for the armature we remove the add leaf's bone because it adds more bones and it doesn't make any sense okay let's do an export and now let's go and unreal we're going to create we can actually we're just going to create a new folder we're going to call this shroom rig go inside import there we go we import that one so when you start the importation it's really important to select mesh let's get a skeletal mesh and also to be sure there's no skeleton be selected if you have a case like that you just go back and do a clear so be sure you have nothing selected here and let's import that there we go so we're gonna fix right away our texture because i know we have previously done um a change with the uv so we have a different uv coordinate if you look a little bit previously in the video so i'm just gonna put this at number one so then we have a this the right uv all right so that's just a detail it's nothing related to the skeleton mesh itself now when we did the import three things have been created so of course all the material but there was a skeleton mesh as we can bring it in our scene and also there was a physical asset as well as a skeleton so if we click on the physical asset and bring us here so we have one physical asset which is uh okay but i don't think we're going to use this and also if we look at the skeleton we have all our our persons here some people said you have to protrude some other but for me it doesn't seems to be a big issue but the thing i want really to fix is the physical asset so because i want to use more more detail bones because right now we just use one bone the number one as a as a physical asset so let's fix that so we're gonna delete this physical asset then we're gonna select the rig the shroom rig and create physical asset and assign create like that so i want to create some some capsule uh and i want to be sure i want let's move this create body for all bones and visible collision by d4 so i don't want to do this i want to have collision so all the bones aren't being created so create acid then we get a first look of our bone which is completely different than the other one so we're going to add just a little bit the bone zero so i want to create kind of a platform to hold the mushroom stand out and put kind of a free free of physic the outer bone so the the mushroom will jiggle a little bit oh let's do this so we're gonna rescale that actually what we can do first let's do a box regenerate this and now let's shrink the box a little bit bring it down so we can look from the side just to be sure we have the right position and maybe just make it a little bit larger to make it look like a little platform like this whoops uh let's go in the front like this whoops there we go so now we have something more as a platform perspective there we go and then let's do a simulation so you can see now my mushrooms start to jiggle and just fall completely so let's fix this so what i'm gonna do here i'm gonna remove gravity here and same for those two those actually i'm all the bones i want to remove the gravity so the mushroom will not be impacted by this so let's remove simulation so you see my my uh my mushroom is there all right so let's try this for the scene so here so i'm gonna start that but if i do this save selected all right so if i do this so nothing happens with my mushroom so what i have to do is to activate physics like this and then it's going to start to go a little bit safe selected you see if i start shooting at it you can see that is moving just a little bit sure there we go like that and his base stay stays still so that's kind of giving like a little bit of effect so i can increase this effect by maybe putting some weight to the head like maybe this guy i'm just going to put like a weight of zero so you have a little bit of weight let's see what's going to happen if we do that i should have used simulators faster but let's see oh yeah so now there's a weight and whoops so we can see this this is not perfect so it's it's a try and error again here so that the base of the mushroom looks like a warm when entered to an apple or something like that so anyway so let me give the idea here so basically you have all the flexibility with your mushroom but unfortunately i notice blender doesn't always bring the perfect physic assets so sometimes you have to redo it or sometime it works but but sometimes not so it's that's about it for the physic asset okay now we did a rig and make it as a beautiful skeleton mesh we can go a bit further and make an animation so this is gonna be one of the last step so to make an animation very simple and blender so it's there's nothing special between blender and unreal engine in term of animation so we're just gonna do something nice here uh the only thing i'm gonna play with uh this is the thing i struggle the most with the unreal and blender is to do animation with stretch so for example here if i do an animation i'm clicking on the bones and i do unpause at it and i can rotate the bones and do some kind of funny stuff like that like a twist or whatever so this is this is something like it will work without any problem with unreal but if we had like uh can at add some constrain in this area none of those will be exported to unreal so you have to go in the different way so the only way really works in terms of uh re uh in turn of bone constraint it's when you when you detach the bone we're just gonna reset that so let's say i want to stretch the base here and put it up so i'm going to select i'm going to go in edit mode so i'm going to do a detach i'm going to detach this from the the main bone here bond four will be detached from bone the default bone so what i do i go in parent do a clear and do a disconnect bone so it's really important that you keep the hierarchy of the bone so always have one bone as a root and none of none of them being at the same level so i do this so now what's happening if i go in pose mode my bone being detached i can grab and start stretching the mushroom so i now just discover there's something funny about that one i wonder who's not attaching it so let's go there let's go and wait paint so this guy all right nobody's really there we go so i just fixed something was in the way all right it was with bond three bone two bond zero there we go so let's go back object mode so this one is still attached uh now i can do like i can detach this guy to disk from this guy so if i go back and edit more like this i'm going to detach this guy from that guy so we can have a better clear disconnect bone and this guy to the sky clear disconnect bone and i'm gonna keep those two attached let's reset all those bone clear transform and so first thing to do is you select your default position so we're gonna do a short animation it's gonna be an animation of 30 frames like that and so you select all and then press i there we go so i pluck on my location same to the end i can do a copy or block my location like that perfect now if i go in the middle that's where i'm gonna start grabbing stuff there we go so my bone will go from there so there we go let's see how things goes there we go so we have a stretchy mushroom perfect so now let's go in object mode let's go at zero select this select the armature file export fbx we're going to call this rig like this so for the animation we just put everything we need export fbx and now let's import this new mushroom like that we can have his own skeleton or the same and import so animation land exported time let's go let's do this there we go so now we have our animation we can just drop it there like this and make it 100 to be at the same level and let's play that there we go so as you can see my animation works perfectly so no real issue here um and it's this guy here i've fixed that kind of error here he kind of loses [Music] so anyway so you can see animation is way more stable than playing with physics so physique is a different ball game for sure so that's covered the animation aspect and that's as you can see there there's nothing complicated except if you want to stretch your bone you have to understand that you have to disconnect them and that's not always easy so if you use ik and blender that will be even better so but the ik and stuff like that is not exportable from blender to unreal so that's that's for this part okay so we we kind of cover most of the basic stuff for our blender exporting stuff to unreal engine but there's one thing i would like to cover to finish with it's this component it's an add-on for blender made by i think it's unreal engine i'm not sure who made those but it's a public add-on which you can easily install to your um to your blender so you just download here so there's two add-ons so you can go there and that's you can download the unreal engine to rigidify that's one thing but there's the send to unreal 1.844 at the moment of doing this so that's the one i want to briefly cover with you so if you go in blender to do that of course you download the zip file you go and edit preference and that's the plugin pipeline so you activate this plugin pipeline and you may have noticed this since the beginning of the demo so i have an extra menu called here pipeline and also i have other stuff here with different group mesh rig collision and extra so this is all needed to activate connection between blender and unreal using this add-on to make it work it's actually it's not a file so you don't exchange fbx files so this addon take care of everything we already show but in different way so what you have to do though is to go in your plugin and you have to activate two things the editor scripting utility making this enable and the python is the transcript plugin so those two need to be activated and when this is done they're going to ask you to restart so you just restart and after that you go in your project setting and you're gonna have a new menu under python remote execution you have to activate this so what what's gonna happen it's gonna bind blender and unreal to be able to exchange data one thing though be sure you only have one unreal engine and maybe just one blender otherwise it kind of may create some conflict so all this thing works it's very simple if you look here there's a path will be created and they will export some asset there so it's not really filed there's a full connection with unreal engine but they will create some asset will appear in our folder here in our content folder so let's do this so in order to make this work so whoops you go and blender you close this okay so you be sure you have the mesh under the shoe under the mesh and the rig under the rig so you go like that and you do an export send to unreal there we go and now if you go back to unreal there's a magic must have happen and if you look there's a new content folder untitled category on title asset and all our stuff are there they even have created an under folder for animation so as you can see this is a very efficient way to exchange your content so you don't have to be to take care about the export setting and stuff like that this gun this add-on take care of all of that for you so i really like it uh that doesn't mean you don't need to know what's happening behind the scene with the with the regular export because you're gonna face similar stuff that we just show but this is a very fast way to to sync your blender with your unreal engine so i recommend you guys to to look at it i'm gonna put the link in the in the the video to to download this add-on so that's conclude the world setup so i hope you you like it that was again for me was more like a bunch of notes for my personal um needs but i think i thought maybe some people would be interested to to see that or to watch it so if you do just let me know just put some comment about stuff i may have missed but all right i hope you like it thank you

Channel: Chrix

Views: 405

Keywords: blender, unreal engine, UE4, UE5, Rig, Mesh, Skeleton Mesh, Animation, Epic

Id: KtiWmjPFpi0

Length: 54min 7sec (3247 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/chainer49]

Thank you! Saving for future reference.

[u/chrixbed]

This very looong video contains all the things I learn about making Blender and Unreal best friends. I mostly did this video for myself as reference notes but I thought it may help other game dev as well.

Let me know what you think and what I miss!