My Indie Blender to Unreal Engine 5 Workflow for Game Environments

I'll show you how I get blender and unreal synced up without any extra downloads or plugins we'll bring over a full environment at once then I'll show you how you can continue developing and making changes within unreal by the end you'll be able to create this fully playable environment all on your own a great piece of the indie game development puzzle let's get [Music] started we start in blender with our blockout the key here is composition I like to start with the general building elements pillars the subway platform tunnels the tracks then I'll add some initial lights before we get into filling it in let me show you something that's going to blow your [Music] mind this is my pipeline from blender to Unreal Step One is Select everything that's going into unreal in our case the blockout mesh and lights step two let's set up our EXP ort so it's quick go to file and Export rightclick Universal scene description or USD and add to Quick favorites quick favorites is just the q key so from now on select objects and press Q for our USD export we want selection only next visible only will ignore anything that's hidden we don't need animation here or hair yes on UV Maps normals and materials everything can pretty much be left at the default value now the magic export the file and open unreal I'm using the third person template so we can walk around I added a new blank level now we need a plugin that ships directly with an unreal so go to edit plugins and search USD USD importer is the one we want it'll have to restart your unreal back in our empty level go to window and under virtual production enable USD stage here's where things get really really cool I would wouldn't think about this like we're importing something into unreal eventually we'll import but for now we're really just opening the USD file within the USD stage settings so go to file and open and find the USD export that we made from blender and just like that we have pretty much a onetoone view of what we had in blender but we can do even better let's match the lighting since we're working in blender we want this to be the standard or our Baseline but in unreal we have some Auto exposure settings similar to an auto exposure on a camera I don't personally love this I want more control so go up to add and search for post and select post process volume instead of our changes applying within this box we want to expand the effect so select it and under details search for the word infinite and turn on infinite extent Now search exposure we want our metering mode to be manual instead of Auto and I found an exposure compensation value of around eight to match what I had in the render view in blender but you might have to tweak that for your own scene the idea here is just to get a basic match and in blender under the color Management Properties I also set that to high contrast now here's what's really convenient in blender let's change something maybe the color of this light to apply the changes just press q and x Port over the top of the old USD file back in unreal under USD stage just choose file and reload and like magic it's updated remember these aren't imported into unreal yet this is kind of like a preview or a staging area that's why it's called stage so now we can come and check in on unreal and see how things are looking and when we're ready to bring it into our game we'll go to actions and import that lets us choose a folder ER in our content drawer on the left we see what's getting imported on the right are options if actor is checked not only will it add everything into our content drawer but it adds actors to the scene exactly where they're placed right now if you uncheck this it adds objects into the content drawer but the scene will be empty since we're set dressing in blender when it's time to import we'll turn on actors one more little thing before I close this under stage options we get this awesome option called nanite triangle threshold anything under this number just Imports like normal but anything over this threshold gets set up as a nanite object automatically a million polygons is a pretty high threshold I doubt we have anything that high in our scene I might lower that when we actually import maybe something like 500,000 for now that's pretty much all we need to look at but since we're still working on our scene and blender let's just hit cancel since we're not ready to bring it out of stage yet I just wanted to show you the whole workflow something else I'd like to add is the player start object if I hit play this is where the third person character drops in kind of a nice way to preview the environment USD doesn't really come with automatic collisions though which isn't a huge problem we'll add them anyway but for now that means as a starting point select the floor go to details select the static mesh and double click it under Collision for now let's just just add box simplified make sure to save and close now we can walk around the scene and get a feel for our environment from the player's perspective anything you want the player to collide with you'll have to add collisions for the good news is unreal remembers these collisions even when we change and reload the USD stage file so we can model texture light do everything in blender and periodically pop over to Unreal for a quick play test and walk through the current environment [Music] once the scene is blocked out I'll spend some time modeling unique objects I'll know I'll need don't forget though there are always libraries of assets you can tap into if they fit your style of course every model I use in this video is available on my site offworld depot.com if you download for blender they come ready to use with blender asset browser it's really nice just to drag and drop assets into the scene I have two main t texturing workflows tiled and baked baked textures are good for small to medium props that can maintain enough detail with a 4K map or less blender will bring over any images you have plugged into the principled Shader tile textures are for objects that are too big to have enough detail with a single 4K map or are just more convenient with a tiled approach things like the floor the walls don't be afraid to literally break up some areas maybe the ti here is broken rather than try to create a texture with broken tile let's actually just model some broken tiles with our existing trim sheet we'll need a separate mesh underneath with a dirt texture as far as set dressing goes and blender I like to keep two things in mind one instance wherever you can that just makes your life easier so you only have to edit one object and it propagates across everything to instance that's altd to duplicate instead of shift d and second make sure you tile with the actual UVS not the mapping node This way everything comes over an unreal already tiled and working and we don't have to set that up again in unreal once it's time to import you can follow the steps I outlined earlier and on real go to USD stage then actions and import choose a spot in your content drawer or create a new folder and enable actors if you want the scene laid out like we have it in blender for me I babysat my USD file and unreal pretty closely so I don't really have any huge changes to make the only thing I really want to do is to get some decals going and unreal I like to add a new folder for decals to keep it clean I'll grab some cardboard decals from offeral depot.com just drag and drop the folder into unreal and everything comes over now for each decal we need to rightclick and add a new material double click the material instead of surface material we want a deferred decal this gives us an error all it's telling us is the blend mode can't be opaque so change that to translucent now it's a simple matter of dragging in our maps at the most basic level a decal is an opacity map beyond that though we can plug in normal roughness or anything else now save and since this is a decal and on a Surface material we can just drag and drop it into our scene you should rotate it for the the surface that you intend to project it on and we get this nice green box that shows us where it's projecting unlock the scaling and you can scale down so we don't get unwanted projections outside of our intended object alternatively select any object search decal and uncheck receives decals now decals won't affect it decals aren't just for adding graffiti to walls you can add things like cracks and damage and stains and grunge and just all sorts of [Music] stuff again please go consider supporting me on my support website I built this from scratch which means a portion of your money doesn't go to any third parties like YouTube or patreon it all goes towards supporting artists creating assets for the website as well as me creating these videos that's all let me know what you want to see next and I'll see you in the next [Music] [Music] one

Channel: Riley Brown

Views: 51,370

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Id: Q9HNRzgRT5E

Length: 10min 22sec (622 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2024