The Blender to Unreal Engine Workflow

hey how's it going I am Todd Blankenship and I am a filmmaker and designer and occasional VFX artist I have spent the better part of the last few years getting really really comfortable in blender but then lo and behold I start to see all these people making really incredible looking stuff in Unreal Engine and frankly I was feeling a bit left out and so I decided okay now I'm Gonna Learn Unreal Engine so when it comes to Unreal you're often going to need to do certain things that unreal doesn't do quite as well at least yet so you're still going to need a DCC like blender or Cinema 4D to do a lot of things and then send that into Unreal Engine but it can be difficult to know which stuff to do in which piece of software in this video I'm going to show you sort of the thought processes and workflows behind getting your stuff from blender into Unreal Engine which things you should do and which one so yeah let's uh let's get started so first things first if you have stuff in blender and you want to get it over to Unreal Engine how do you do that one thing I tend to use in unreal a whole lot is photo scanned objects because with nanite you can handle a ton of geometry so let's say I want to take this scan of a plastic skeleton and add it to a scene in unreal first I do all of my geometry Cleanup in blender first getting rid of all the stuff that I don't want this is a great example of the type of thing you don't want to try to do in unreal at all it's way easier in blender so using some Boolean modifiers will clean up the geometry till all we have is our skeleton so with our skeleton selected I will go to file export and we will select fbx first off on path mode we're going to select copy and then we're going to hit this little icon right here this little toastery looking guy and it's that's going to make sure that we go ahead and save all of our textures with our fbx file and then we're going to say limit to selected objects that way we know we're not we're trying to bring in cameras or lights or anything like that and if we want to we can also just select mesh and that'll kind of do a similar thing and then down here for smoothing I'm going to change the smoothing to face and hit export fbx okay so here we are in Unreal Engine and we got a nice little little medieval scene with a I don't know sword in a stump that I threw together with just lots of fun foliage and stuff let's go ahead and bring our skeleton in and you know have it like sitting up against this tree maybe somebody was trying to get this sword many moons ago and they didn't quite make it so I'm going to make a fold called skeleton and we will go ahead and go and find our fbx file so right here we have our skeleton we're just going to click open and right here I'm going to go ahead and build nanite because why not and search for materials we want it to be looking for materials create new materials all that kind of stuff we're just going to hit import all and generally you'll always get some sort of a message log I don't really know what it means or why it happens almost every single time but so be it so you can just go ahead and hit clear we're back in our scene and we have a material created we have a texture so it did bring in our textures and we have our static mesh of our skeleton so let's just drag that right on in so let's bring him up to where we can see him and we'll just kind of rotate them and get them in place I kind of want them leaning up against this tree and uh yeah there we go now we have a nice scene with a little little skeleton guy in there but then let's say your situation isn't quite that simple and you want to do a whole lot more than just clean up a photo scan well then you have a few questions to ask yourself which things do you want to save for unreal and which things do you want to go ahead and get done in blender before you ever go into unreal so so first let's talk about modeling so put pretty simply you want to go ahead and do any complex modeling related tasks outside of unreal if you want to do any detailed modeling of any kind Beyond just basic landscape shapes or Primitives you want to do that in blender so if you are a blender user you want to go ahead and do most of your modeling inside of blender on a object by object basis so then that kind of leads me to another thing this can be a little bit tricky let's talk about scene layout so with scene layout I mean the overall blocking out and design of your scene as a whole you may be tempted to lay out all the objects in your scene in blender and then export one big giant fbx file the only problem is that when you do that all of the objects will come over with the origin point of the geometry set as the world origin from blender so what this means is that if you decide to make any changes to the layout of your scene it can get really frustrating trying to figure out and go back and rearrange it because the origin points will be all over the place this might get fixed eventually in an update I'm assuming but for the time being I prefer to do blocking and layout of my scenes in unreal okay let's talk about materials this is a big one while you can do some texturing in blender before you head to Unreal you want to be careful not to spend a bunch of time doing work that won't translate basically if it's anything beyond a standard PBR texture slot just using basic diffuse metalness roughness things like that it's not going to translate using special nodes in blender even things as simple as color ramps or you and saturation nodes they won't come across when you send it with your fbx file so if you're going to do some really specific texture work you're either going to need to keep it really basic and then beef it up once you're in unreal or you need to bake each of those things down into their own image textures which I'll drop a really great tutorial on how to do that in the description so before you go crazy with Textures in blender before going to Unreal just make sure you're not setting yourself up for double work especially since there are so many great materials to pull from on Mega scans so another thing that you might want to do inside of blender is have some really specific like cloth simulations or you know physics simulations or just various Dynamics that's really easy to do too and to show it we'll go with an old blender tradition a wacky inflatable tube band once you have some cloth settings that you like all you have to do is Click bake in the physics Tab and let it cache each frame that you specify then you can just export it as an Olympic file with the right frame range specified then once you're in unreal you just import it as a geometry cache and create a new level sequence and add your objects to the sequencer and hit track then select geometry cache now when you hit play in your sequencer your cloth Sim should play back perfectly but speaking of uh simulations and things like that to me one of the biggest things that has led me to jump over to Unreal in a big way especially in more recent unreal updates is foliage if your project involves any significant amount of foliage you're really going to want to think about doing all of that in unreal now that foliage is nanite enabled you can have truly insane amounts of foliage in your scene and still have pretty decent performance especially compared to things like this scene that I've been working on in blender where one frame takes like 10 minutes to render I have this scene in unreal with way more foliage and I'm still able to run things at least somewhat smoothly comparatively it's just so much fun to play with foliage and not feel like I'm about to destroy my computer so it is basically just taking the strengths of one piece of software and merging them with the strengths of the other piece of software and then you know they come together and you can make some really really cool stuff anyways thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time [Music] this is [Music]

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 180,736

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, blender, unreal engine, ue5, blender tutorial, real-time 3d

Id: N8y_eH7QB2o

Length: 8min 6sec (486 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023