Import FBX Files into Unreal Engine Better (Unreal Engine + Cinema 4D Tutorial)

foreign looking for a better way to import your fbx files into unreal I'm sure you are I'll show you another way to do it starting off with Cinema 4D I wanted to show you the model that I'm going to import first it's just static mesh but I have this model of a car that I've gone through and organize this down into null objects and groupings and set this up the way that I want so in here I've got these kind of set up to how I would animate these in Cinema 4D and tires that can move and all that fun stuff but just to kind of show you how this comes in but this wheel is a good example where I have my rotation kind of set here in the middle so this can rotate perfectly I don't have to worry about realigning this later I've got this also set up into other parts like headlights interior dashboard just anything that I think I would want to access later and not you know want to fully repeats into Unreal Engine so this is the first example I want to show you okay so in Unreal Engine I've got a blank scene with just some basic lighting so we can see what we're going to do and now we're going to import this model so I've got the model that I had prepped for Unreal Engine which is what I just showed you and we're going to import this inducing method one so this is what everybody's used to seeing at least I'm assuming um you have the option to make a skeleton Mash Nana you've got your basic import options and you know this is what you do when you drag and drop great so we're going to import this model into this folder and watch it load okay so our file has imported we have all those normal layers that it gets we're just clear that out and as you can see we have all of our static meshes that come with this car which is a lot and we also have our materials that go with it as well which is good so what I want to do when I set these up is I like containing these inside of a blueprint for a number of reasons but it just gives me flexibility going between different levels or scenes or whatever so I'm going to make a blueprint class an actor we'll just call it BP car and now the way I would set this up is I'm going to go in and grab all of my static meshes which is a lot and drag and drop these guys into here and as you can see Great Cars imported got all the pieces that I want the downside is is I don't have that organization that I had before so all that time I spent my simple 4D scene is gone at least organizing it so I'd have to go back through and create parents and adjust pivots and all that stuff to rebuild this to the groupings that I want the other downside with this as you can see the fbx Imports with its Anchor Point or origin at the world origin so the zero zero zero and Cinema 4D is now the pivot point of this mesh inside of unreal so if I want to rotate this to have the wheel spin you can now see that's a problem so what I would normally do is create an empty null object I'd place it in the middle I'd put all these in but it's really really difficult to try to create your rotation point and make it perfect and a lot of these times these Wheels start to wobble and it just poses a problem um you could also try to move the Pivot Point itself but regardless unless if you have a good point to snap to it's really hard to get this perfectly centered uh one workaround that I would do in the past is I would make this wheel inside of Cinema as its own object and I would zero that out to the world origin so I knew that it was going to rotate perfectly and when I would bring it in I would manually just align all of the wheels so this is the method that I am the most aware of and what most people have probably done so you can see it has its flaws it's a fair amount of work to rebuild this um yeah so method two we're going to import this same method but we're going to try something different so I'm going to copy my folder location we're going to go to file import into level and now we're going to select this why this is this way I really don't know but it is another way of doing it and big shout out goes to Wayne Porter at Studio X I never knew this until he showed it to me and this has been a big game changer so now I'm going to open this up we're going to drop this into the folder that we want and now you're going to notice we have a different fbx import options menu and took me a minute to kind of really dive into this and all of the stuff you saw in method one is still here but we have more options to play with so we start with we have a root node which is great and static meshes you'll see that all of them are still in here and the great thing about this and I'm pretty sure this is why the root note is here is this will actually keep your or file organization the way that you had it so it Imports all these static meshes um yeah a number of different options you can use over here but it also gives you the option to import skeletal meshes as well nothing's animating in here so we're just going to focus on static meshes but there's another tab too where you can see all the materials that I had in Cinema 4D are in here and you can optionally pick which ones you want to import or not the last thing I wanted to note on this that to me I think is one of the more important things is hierarchy type so you have three options here create level actors which will import all of this into the current level that you have similar to how cineware would do it you have all your meshes available you have access to them you have create one actor with components so this will create one single object over in your outliner and then you'll have access to all these sub components in sequencer or you can pull that object in and then access things but it just keeps it a lot cleaner you won't have like several hundred things listed down here but at the same point it'll also give you all of your meshes and objects over here so you could bring them back in it just cleans it up a little bit and kind of contains it and the one I like the most is create blueprint asset so I'm going to go ahead and import this in and it's going to button all of this up into a blueprint for me all right so we've imported this in and now we have this blueprint open so as you can see it created this blueprint like told it to and all of my interior components are here so all my meshes are here my organization is held intact which is great I've got my doors and everything else so my whole scene hierarchy is here and best of all my rotation is kept in place so now if I want to animate these wheels I don't have to worry about that fbx being off it is in its place and better yet the actual mesh itself also has its pivot point in the spot that it's supposed to be so it's not like all the meshes are at this world origin and just this empty object that contains it is there everything is exactly the way that I set it up in Cinema 4D and like I said the file organization just saves a lot of time when you have a model that you're going to use with you know 274 pieces to it I can jump immediately into starting to rig this thing up and having it go so huge benefits to doing the method you know file and import into level this has been a game changer for importing stuff as you can see so the last method I want to show you is actually the same thing as method two but I have another file here and anything that's not static meshes that's dealing with animation I have this Taurus here that is a uh just a static mesh and then I've got this platonic that I've just simply animated because I wanted to see how I can make smaller assets and import them and just see how this fbx version does and I've also got a camera in here now I I don't deal much with cameras in cinema that I bring over to unreal I usually just do the cameras in unreal because that's my preferred method but if you did want to animate some of the stuff I brought it in so um what I initially tried to do is I created a null object I put the camera inside of this and then I went through and I animated this null object so one problem with this in the fbx format that I've noticed is the null objects don't export it's got to have some piece of geometry attached to it for the animation to actually export so what I do is a workaround it's not ideal but it's not a big deal either is I just go to and create a simple polygon it can be a triangle it can be a quad um it's just enough to import in like I said it's a tiny little piece I just make it small so it can't be seen But it Imports in the data correctly in the fbx and I can make the either make it invisible or I can just transfer over the keyframe animation if that's what I really want to do but for this fine to just make it invisible so you can't see and then I can attach something uh like my camera to it and import this in so watch this play you can kind of see like this is the weird little shot that I made just to kind of test and see is this working so I exported out this whole setup as an fbx and now let's import that so same scene why not just treat it like a little icon or something so let's go to file import into level and got it up copy this path nope copy this path and paste it into unreal and I've got this mography thing because that's what I'm making models drop it down in here into version three so same thing here we've got this root node for this I don't want to create a blueprint I could either do the level actors and just bring these in as individual pieces which I'll probably do second but I'll just show you this first we'll create one actor with components so you can see how this part works too my static mesh that Taurus that's not animating is going to import as a static mesh and skeletal mesh so I've got the platonic which is that rotating little Diamond thing and polygon which I'm using as a null object and I just didn't rename it and then also the two materials that I've got so let's import this into this level so now you'll see I've got this guy so it imported the camera in with it we're just going to bring this up over the top of the car and I've got a sequence open so let's just take a look at how this guy breaks down so if I imported this in and I wanted to animate so if I look at the tracks these are all the components that come in with it that are nested in this single object so the cameras here um Cinema 4D editor which I'm pretty sure this is what allows you to keep updating um and whatnot but I'm not 100 sure you default scene root the platonic the polygon and the Taurus so right now I'm just going to do the platonic for argument's sake on this and I'm going to open up track and then animation and you'll see that animation that we brought in is now here so I can slide this out so watch it go and look there it is animating in all of its Glory so you have access to this which is great same idea this mography thing like I said it's a little bit of a cleaner method but it could be a little slower depending on how you're doing it we'll bring this polygon in as well and this has its own animation that came in with it as well so now that's moving around in space somewhere kind of lost track of it and it's a little harder to see um but yeah that's that's the first method of doing this so the other method we're just going to delete this delete all this because we're just going to try this one last time so you guys can see it file import into level Mo graphy thing models lyric there's three yeah we're gonna replace it it's still detecting uh some root component but this one I just going to bring it as just level actors there's not a lot this is probably the best method of just having quick control over stuff and being able to modify it without it all being encapsulated into one piece static mesh still skeleton meshes look good and our materials so let's import this guy in and now you'll see we've got all of those separate pieces that we could just create a folder and organize it that way so editor manage so toric the Taurus and the polygon whoops and the platonic move those guys back up and now I can just drag and drop these guys in here add the animations it's really quick same with the polygon let's add its animation to it and now these are moving so now we'll just make this camera child uh polygon we're going to attach it to the only bone that it makes when it's a skeletal mesh and let's test it so now you can see I've moved the alignment but this uh little mography thing would have actually been in the exact same spot that Cinema 4D imported it to so we saw earlier it was down there it would have actually been the same thing but since I slid it up it's there but all this information is still intact so I've got whatever I need this camera I could now go ahead and set this as a Target or an actor or whatever and I can start using the animation that I used in Cinema 4D and building off of that for this so I hope you found these methods useful uh it's already saved me a ton of time and helping me work a lot faster thanks for watching happy importing

Channel: Cart & Horse

Views: 5,575

Keywords: import FBX files into Unreal Engine, import FBX Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine import FBX, UE import FBX, FBX import into level, Unreal engine import into level, ue FBX import into level

Id: mQ1m-fZrCVQ

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2023