Seamlessly Move Your Unreal Engine Meshes to Blender: A Step-by-Step Tutorial!

hello everybody and welcome to organian's puzzle box in this video i would like to go through a workflow uh how to on how to export meshes out of unreal engine and import them into a program such as blender and where in which you can use the mesh with the textures and be able to use it in your own project now this is a very important workflow because it allows you to go on the unreal engine marketplace find a environment pack or a mesh pack that you you like and you can export it then you can export the textures as well in a very straightforward way but it's important that you actually know how to set it up back into your own program and it's also important to know how to export everything out of unreal so anybody who's struggling with this you'll find that it is quite easy once you look at my video obviously but the idea here is you can go and download stuff off the marketplace you can find a lot of free content especially things from you know mega scans you can go and get stuff from the actual uh you know people that sell these assets and then you can use them in whatever project you want and i think that's a very powerful very powerful way of working um you shouldn't be constrained only to unreal engine i don't think even though they provide a lot of items obviously a lot of things on their platform but you should be able to use them in creative ways on your own um scenes as i've said such as in blender um and this is what i'm going to show you so let's uh let's begin also guys if you would like to support my channel and you have a pet and you also live in the uk or the usa uh you can head over to my channel blue nova designs it's in the description below and i can get a pet portrait made for you on cushions on fleeces on canvases uh all sorts of products we do all sorts of designs all you need to do is just choose a portrait upload your pet photo and place your order as i've said we've got canvases cushions frames framed art mugs or fleeces and they're all very very good products if you guys really like to support me then please head on over and order one uh thank you so let's begin so for those of you who would like to get this um pack that i've got all you need to do is go on onto your epic games launcher go into unreal engine and select the marketplace and in the search box just type in factory this will then open a list of assets that have the name factory in them and you'll be able to find this particular pack um somewhere around here yeah this is the one and as you can see it's a free uh it's it's free for you to to get and the um assets are being shown into these photos as i said there's a lot of assets into this pack and once you've uh downloaded it so once you download it you can create a project and then open it in unreal and i've got this open over here it will take some time for it to load this is a massive project but once it's loaded it will run a lot smoother and a lot faster once you're inside you may want to select certain meshes and start fiddling around with them and you know see what you want to get out of unreal so in this particular scenario i've selected this particular machine here which is a assembly line box as it's called over here and we want to start exporting it so the first thing that we want to do is we want to right click it into the in here in the outliner and then we've got an option where it says browse to asset and what that does is it causes the um content browser to go to this asset that we have into the inside unreal so we found a mesh we can right click it and then we have an option here called asset actions when you go over that you'll have a few options in here we select the export option and then it will ask us where do we want to basically where do we want it to be exported so i'm just going to leave it in downloads just like that and this is the name of it and we have a few other um you know types of files to export there's an obj as an unreal object text or whatever i've never used those but we're just going to do as an fbx and then we're going to press save on the keyboard and then we'll have a few more options in here but again i'm just going to press export and that's you know that that's finalized we now have the mesh export that went real which was quite straightforward now bear in mind that this has different lods and what what has happened here is um unreal has exported all the lods of this mesh which is quite neat now we want to get its textures and the textures can be found on the right side over here these are the materials that it's using so what you want to do at this point is if you press this you know magnifying glass over here it will take you into the content browser over to where the material is and that's you know that's something that we wanted to see if we double click the material a new panel will be opened which i can bring over here and this is the material itself and these are all the maps that are being associated with it so at this point what you want to do is you want to find these textures over here in order to export them out of unreal so by pressing the magnifying glass again it will open them in the content browser and in this particular scenario it's so that you know it so happens that all these meshes are actually one two three four five so i'm going to select each of these so that's all the five meshes from from this list and i can right click and then i'll have an option in here to say bulk export and then i'm going to go back into downloads i'm just going to make a new folder texture set and then i'm just going to go inside and select folder and now all the textures have been exported unreal which is you know quite simple now as you can see some of these um some of these materials in here for example one of them is orm which means that it's a it's a texture that's going to be combined um and it's going to to include ambient occlusion roughness and metallic so when we go into blender we're going to have to separate the rgb of this map in order to give us all the maps that we need so let's uh head on over to blender now now that we're in blender we're going to do the unthinkable thing which is to delete the default cube camera and light of course and once that's deleted we're going to go to file and then press the import button and select the fbx we're going to navigate to the folder where we've saved the asset which is here and this is the asset itself now like i've told you before uh it does contain some you know all the different lods of the mesh so that's the lowest poly version right there actually if we if we turn on if we let's go into shaded mode and then let's just turn on wireframe at this point you can see which one is a more detailed and which one is lacking detail but in this particular scenario they all sort of seem to be quite close but this is the high poly so we're just gonna use that one uh really it's fine um and then the materials themselves have been added in as well in here but we don't obviously we don't have the maps yet so let's just take the wireframe off and now we're going to create a new window and we're going to bring in our we're going to open our shader editor and this is what we've got in here which is not great obviously we need more maps to get everything sorted so i'm just going to delete this normal map here as it doesn't actually work and let's begin bringing in the maps so i'm now in the folder where the textures are let's just open them and these are the all the maps that we have so we've got a base color we've got the um emission we've got a mask but again i'm not really sure why it's called that but obviously it's going to affect something in the mesh and then we have an assembly line box and assembly line orm so let's just bring in the basic color i'm just going to drop it in there and let's connect it to the base color of our mesh and as you can see this is well you guessed it the base color of this mesh at this point we want to bring in the normal let's say so let's just bring in the normal over here again we're going to drop that straight in here and this will give us the normal map that we wanted uh oddly enough i do seem to get be getting a bit of artifacting around here but we'll see um i think that may be to do with the view so let me just try and click this maybe go to sorry ten thousand something like that and then zero zero point zero zero one now still hasn't fixed it very interesting interesting stuff but yeah let me just try and go to object um and then shade smooth now doesn't seem to be affecting it that much oh well we'll see once we add all the maps and and see how that looks like so i've just switched my uh normal map to non color make sure you do that so it doesn't actually um it does actually show properly and then we want to bring in the um we've got this as i said we've got the um emission map so let's bring that over as well um the emission map in order to connect it you may you want to add a new shader so you want to add an add shader you want to also add a emission map we connect this over into here and then the emission into the shader the principal b vsf the sdf sorry in the emission they add shader and then we've that's that's the that's the setup for it i'm not really sure where the emission is coming from it may just be these two buttons but if we play around with the strength um well we should have been able to see it but we haven't got the bloom activated so that's where it is so i'm just gonna put that back to one which is fine um now we want to bring in some more maps so let's just bring the orm which is the more interesting mesh to bring so we'll leave that as an rgb because that's what we need and then we're going to bring in a separate sorry a separate rgb channel we're going to put our color into the image and then we're going to uh you know we've got the ambient occlusion which is the r uh color the g represents roughness and b represents metallic so let's just bring in a mix rgb uh node and with that in in there we're just going to add the roughness and the metallic in it and then we're going to bring this into our roughness bar our roughness channel uh this is what we get honestly i have no idea what's up with this artifacting and yeah that's the problem right okay so now we've got it properly set up uh we can play with the fact um you know for the value of this to in order to uh make it more uh metallic or more rough um there are you know you want to leave this as a mix not a multiply or anything else just as a mixture as a as a mix but there are um different ways that you can approach this you know get different results on it one thing that you can do is you can add a in inverse uh sorry an invert um over here and we're going to do the invert on the metallic um so we want the uh b letter to go through here and then throw in here like that so it feeds it feeds through like that which will then fix our mesh a lot nicer but you can see that now that it's actually looking quite okay um and then the last mask that there is to add is a this well it's sorry the last map is this mask thing uh which in this particular case i'm not entirely sure what it's for um because i'm not i wasn't able to actually find anything missing in the mesh uh when i played around with it so we're just going to leave that for now now what we want to do is we want to go back into our materials for this object and as you can see we added everything on the m1 assembly line box now the decals we don't actually have um anything for this material so um what happens is we need to bring the other maps for this so the decals are probably going to be these parts over here um hopefully there's not another mesh hiding in there no there isn't okay so we're just going to go back into unreal and when you look over here you've got element one and this is for the decals that we were talking about so we're going to press our magnifying glass and then double click the material and then magnify glass again and this is showing us that we've got some decals over here and then we've also got all of these to go with it we're going to right click them and then select asset actions and bulk export and we're going to just use the same folder so select folder they're all exported now so we can head on back to blender i'm just going to delete as i said the normal map actually i'm going to delete all the nodes i'm going to go back to this material and then select everything from here um then ctrl c to copy go back to this material delete that and just add this in and then connect it now obviously the maps are incorrect so this is the point where we need to open again and just select the maps that are you know for the decals so bc for decals i think there's some more elements that get updated not just that again this one we want the orm for decals and then this mask thing though as i said i don't know what it's doing i don't know if we have on a mission have we got a mission yet we do so we're just gonna add that and you can see the the emission map over there and then we've got the normal uh which the colors do have one as well just make sure you switch it back to none color and that's it we've now added the decals in there um okay so then the next line and here is this one same thing you want to select it over here press the magnifying glass double click it find the maps by magnifying glass again and you found them and this one doesn't have an emission which is fine again asset action um export bulk export and then select folder and they're being exported so this moves quite quite quickly um i would say so it's not definitely not time consuming once once you did the first material but again this also is because the uh asset pack that i've got is so well um you know so well established so there wasn't any really any particular particular problems in this instance i'm just gonna delete the emission as we don't need it for this one um and now i've got line box um sorry it's line color so that's the basic color which i think it's just update some stuff inside here so let's just yeah as you can see it updates this track over here this is what this material is for um and then i'm going to change the orm but you basically you get the idea and this is this is well that's that's the important thing you understand what the idea of this is and how to how to do it um and once you've added everything again there's one more material to do in there but we're just going to skip that once you added everything then your mesh is ready to use just like you were able to use in unreal obviously if you want to animate it and so on that's fine and then you know you can just go on and scale it to whatever sort of whatever you need for your project and so on obviously you can do a lot of modifications to it i'm not really sure why this is bugging around well you know why i get these um these artifacts here um it could be because i've edited these values yeah so you see it really depends on how far away you are from it but it can be fixed uh with a proper camera in place as well so i hope you guys found this um the video useful and that it was um you know going quite okay for you uh just as a final note i've realized i haven't actually um sorted out the ambient occlusion node so i'm just going to quickly do that because we obviously got the r channel here that we've not um so added in any way so i've got the base color over there now i just uh need to as i said bring in my ambient uh so what i want to do now is add a color ramp um i'm just going to put it over here and i want to connect my r channel over to the color ramp as well then i want to add a math node and actually let me just duplicate this i'll make two math nodes and i'll switch them both to multiply and then i'm going to put the color um in one of the values over in um well actually no i didn't need a multiply and either the mix rgb in there right so makes rgb and a math node and i'm gonna take the color put it into color one take the color ramp and put it in color two and this can go into our base color now and then i want to get my and then also don't forget to put this over to multiply and then i'm going to put the color ramp as well in the second value over here and then add that into the specular channel as well so this will give us some ambient occlusion um obviously you can start toying around with the settings of it and just see what you get um it's really well it's really up to you based on your preferences uh but yeah that will be the full node setup for um blender so from unreal engine to blender you can pretty much apply the same methodology to anything that you export out of unreal but it really depends on how the how the maps were set up uh it's you know we're lucky that this environmental pack that i've just used has such clean um you know such a clean setup available but the mega scans also have a very nice setup as well so i hope you guys found this video as i said useful and you enjoy it please like please leave a like subscribe and comment if you enjoyed the content if you would like to see more from me and uh well i'll see you guys in the next video so see ya

Channel: Arghanion's Puzzlebox

Views: 36,377

Keywords: unreal engine, blender, unreal engine 4, how to export meshes out of unreal engine, material texture, shader editor blender, unreal engine 5, import meshes in blender, export mesh from unreal, asset export unreal engine, unreal, unreal engine 3d modeling, unreal engine tutorial, blender export tutorial, how to export from unreal to blender, how to use unreal and blender, how to export from unreal engine to blender, nanite, lumen, exporting mesh from unreal

Id: iDz7X2RZDvM

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2020