Has anyone developed proven and working export workflow for Blender and UE4 ? (for static and rigged meshes)
Ohh, good one! Thanks.
Also look at this: Blender-Addon-UE-Tools
Interesting. It’s surprising that export to Unity seems pretty straight forward, but somehow UE4 requires special setup and fiddling 
(I see there is renaming tool in Liu’s add-on)
You can do more than just a simple export. Otherwise just use FBX.
But UE4 has a default skeleton. So having a addon that supports that is great. The same for the node based materials. If you can export complex materials to UE4 that would be great.
Unity does not have a built-in node based material editor, so there this is not needed. But I’m sure you would also be happy about a special exporter with more advanced features…
I am having a huge problem with exporting animations to UE4 right now. The Epic staff clamins that they can’t really help until the Blender team sorts out some stuff on their end.
I do get corrupted data exported/imported for some bones in some animations. Can’t really figure out if there is any rule in it. Even if I make two animations starting with exact the same pose (copied) one of them is having some of the bones twisted… Right now my only solution is to give up on some of the animations and wait.
If anyone has any experience with similiar behaviour I would be really greatfull for sharing it.
Ouch. That sucks. I haven’t gotten to getting animated bipedal characters from Blender to Unity yet, but my mechanical stuff gets into Unity with no issues (so far). So I believe it’s something on UE4 side and not per se on Blender’s FBX side.
Fyi, issue re FBX animation from Blender in UE4 is well known now, see e.g. https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/98704/fbx-import-wrong-application-of-animations-to-bone.html
Has been reported since months, and still have no serious answer about the issue being in Blender’s exporter, or FBX importer - exact same .fbx loads fine on Unity though…
The Epic team has requested my .blend file with animations for testing. Let’s hope that they manage to figure it out.
I’m running into issues with a character of mine, too, I really hope this gets sorted out.
hi rimau,
hope this helps, under the skeleton Tree the option to change the bone targeting seems to fix a lot of issues, I was getting the feet and hips twisted for no logical reason, Cheer Rob.
also had a good play with exporting from Make Human( UE t-pose version 1.1? very nice upgrade) to UE4.7 to blender and back again, trying to get reliable results,
will add basic workflow here when I get home,
The UE Tools looks very nice, gonna do some testing with it. The way i see UE4 dont like ik bones, so you should only use fk bones, is that true?
It’s not that UE4 doesn’t like IK bones, it’s that when exporting animations - you export it baked to FK. They have an internal means of enabling IK for the purposes of foot placement on slopes, etc and most games don’t use IK for anything more advanced than that (those that do will tend to use something other than IK bones used for generating FK-baked animation).
I use real time ik all the time, it’s really handy…
and footie… and facie? 
I think one method would be blending between max right, max left, max up and max down aiming,
can you blend animations in ue4 easily?
That’s great, but most UE4 games do not. If you don’t need to spend the CPU/SPU processing IK for your game, it’s processing power that can be spent elsewhere during that frame 
Very easily. I suggest watching the tutorial where one of the senior UE4 developers takes you through the import of character and animations from Blender into UE4. There is a minute or so there where they show just how easy it is to blender animations from idle->walking->running
I mean blending arm actions, to simulate Ik, without using ik, if that makes any sense.
also, there is one time where using real iK may be necessary, AR is coming round the bend.
I guess if you could get full body/bone orientation from a actor in real time you would not need ik, but I see 3d mice happening first.
real time Ik is cool for things like punching a target, or grabbing a door knob etc,
what I really like it for is swapping animation targets / cursor so you can actually aim, in the viewspace with mouse over (I don’t know what they use in ue4)
this is in my gen2 actor, I am adding a better system in my gen 3.
ever use pulses of force, and resistance to a dynamic actor to simulate foot step ‘bursts’ rather then flat accel or servo motion? it works pretty nice…
what games are you working on or are they behind a non disclosure?
It makes sense, but that’s better solved with actual IK. For the most part though, you don’t need it. Most animations involving two interacting characters are designed to work with each other when baked. You can see that a little by watching small slides and position adjustments in game where the main character needs to wrap their arm around a throat or whatnot but is just a little off the right position for it.
None of this is really pertinent to the subject. Remember it’s “Blender > UE4 workflow”, not what you are doing in BGE & how far along that path you are. You’ve been derailing every other game engine related thread so far, leave at least one of them on topic, OK?
Actually I was talking shop on actors, independent of the engine…
also I am very curious about all engines,
I do plan on exporting to ue4 at some point,
I was wondering how much was already there?
and if IK is available and recasting, this technique can be applied in ue4.
Do limts to bones export to there ik or would I have to set them all again?
is IK threaded in ue4? like down the chains?
Do the ik bones easily allow you to get the bones Axis?
- Are there any bugs reported to Blender regarding these problems?
- Did you test a recent nightly build to see if the issues fixed?
Hi
I did place a Bug report myself, the Epic team got my .blend file. I did get a response and I need to do some more testing, as so far the response is not exactly solving the problem. I do have a few things to do first, but I should be able to gather some proper info around Sunday. I will post it on UE4 answerhub thread (https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/187729/bug-report-blender-fbx-animations-problem.html) and post an update here.
As for the nightly build I did not test that one. I will first run through the stuff that I have already planned, and depending on the results will take this into account as well.