Does UE4 support Blender?

Hey Epic or anyone who reads this,

Does Unreal Engine 4 support the Application Blender? I am a newbie to Unreal Engine 4 but not to UDK and past Epic Games products Unreal Tournament and their respective modification tools.

I know that some artists in the industry view blender as crap. But it is quite the capable 3D modeling tool. See the Blender Artists community for reference. Would it be possible to get a tighter integration between Blender and Unreal 4?

Because in the past Integration with free tools such as blender have not been very tight and difficult to work with at-least with UDK.

Thank you for your time,

  • Ben

Yes it supports Blender, You export the file as an Autodesk .fbx file. I just tried importing a cube that I exported from blender and it worked fine. You can also choose options such as importing materials as well when you import it into UE4. Just get the Scaling how you want it in Blender before you export it to UE4 so you wont have to scale it up so much when you import it. I hope I helped.

Thank you for your reply. :slight_smile:

I am really happy that Unreal 4 is supporting blender and other apps now :slight_smile:

Once again thank you.
-Ben

edited to remove a bit of frustration in the wording*

I disagree. At the moment there is still not a good compatibility with blender exports.
Yes static meshes… static meshes are no problem…
But at some point you want to make your own game character.
And this is where things start to fail.

For instance there are few important things to know when working with Blender and animations.
The first one is related to transforms in Blender, usually you apply all your transforms in Blender before exporting. Then you can play with Blender exporter options to modify this in a way you like for UE4 import.

Also, the forward vector used internally in Blender (Object mode) is not the same in UE4. This is something common though regarding 3D modeling tools and game engines.

The Blender exporter have an option to setup custom orientations before writing the data in the resulting FBX. Play with it to ensure you model is facing the same directions as in UE4 (x forward in UE4).
If you still have issues with the forward vector then just rotate you object in Blender so it’s facing the x vector in Blender, then export as is.

For animations, the current official Blender exporter seems to have an issue regarding bones orientation as well…
While you may repeat the above fix to reorient all your bones, I agree that this is a **** process that you have to only do at the end of the work to not break the animation within Blender. A copy of the original file may be of help as you play with it only for export purposes.

For the bone issue, search in Google because an experimental FBX exporter based on the official one has been made wich introduce an option to setup bone orientations before exporting, thus without following the above destructive way of working. I used this one and it work for me.

Then the scaling, usually the imported Blender objects are too small for UE4.
Just use the scale factor in the exporter. Play with it and find a value that feets your needs.

I know it can be frustrating to loose time with things like this but we should find our tricks until the official Blender exporter will comes with more options that becomes usefull for one or another engine.

As long as you use blender 2.70, everything works fine :slight_smile:

I got problems with 2.71. After going back to 2.70, everything works fine. I have no errors and every exported file is fine (: All animations work, and the rig of rigify is working.

Yes it does but not very well. You need to export an fbx from blender to UE4. Exporting static meshes works great but animations tend to mess up.

These unreal live streams should help you get started:

?v=BeaKeiepoas

I would not import materials from blender. Its cleaner to just create the manually since the import doesn’t actually do anything useful to the materials for you. You would just end up having to rename the materials and delete nodes. Its a waste of time.

Yes Blender is supported however for first time users it can be quite frustrating especially if youve worked with Blender before. Some points to consider when creating your 3d models in Blender.

  1. Create a UV-map of your model
  2. Bake your Textures, Normals and Ambient Occlusions to three separate UV maps
  3. Export your model to and Fbx file format. In the export settings change the scale to 100 and set the smoothing parameter to “Face”.
  4. In Unreal engine import your Fbx file together with the three UV-maps
  5. To apply all three maps onto your model you first need to create a new material
  6. Add three “Texture Sample” nodes and connect the top output channel to Base Color, Normal and Ambient Occlusion.
  7. For each of the Texture Sample nodes select the corresponding texture in the Details panel
  8. Save your new material
  9. Drag and drop your 3D mesh Fbx file into your scene/level and you done. You will have a nicely texture model that looks identical to that in Blender complete with diffuse colours and Normals

PBR ? Are anims working for latest 2.79b ?

So atm all there is , is simple diffuse ?
ty