Blender Unreal 4 Epic Live Stream Training

We haven’t set a date just yet but let Alexander know if you are interested in this by liking and retweeting. If we can build enough interest, we can make this a regular thing. :smiley:

No idea if this is a basic/advanced stream but if it’s aimed for new users some topics could be:

Basic Blender scene setup (metric 0.01 scale so you can export/import with 1 scale).

Showing off the new Blender specific root bone fix, renaming the rig object “armature” removes the extra root bone on import and allows for root motion by animating the root bone in pose mode.

Simple scripting (export script) to fix the above issue for any rig, the script logic could be something like:
Select model, get rig from armature modifier, save rig name as temp name, rename rig to “armature”, run the FBX export, rename the rig back to its original name that was saved.

Showing the morph target workflow in Blender, there was recently a livestream on this topic so just a short version: Create 2 shape keys for a rigged character, select the second one and set it to 1.000, then sculpt some shape key and export/import the mesh in UE4. Easy!

For a “themed” stream you could do something like making an asset from start to finish in Blender. Maybe covering a few useful addons in the process.

I like this idea.

They made an old blender video about exporting the mannequin from ue4 to blender, to get the skeleton for animation. That could be good, to get the correct bone names. I bought an add-on though for rigging. Auto Rigging Pro or something.

I hope they can check out a nightly build of 2.8 viewport, and mention any plans on getting a unreal default lit material in blender for eevee viewport after 2.8 is released. that for me would be a dream, material creation in blender and realtime preview and it will look the same in unreal engine.

in this video at ~33min mark they talk about how to setup the hair for a photorealistic character and mention 3dsmax. I would like to see if it’s not possible to do in blender with particle system + billboards or some other workflow.

I’ve mentioned all this on twitter, but 140 chars is not optimal to get a well explained pitch through, I hope they [epic] sometimes visits this forums.

Very interested in this :slight_smile:

There’s also UE4tools which is free and has the same bone names as the UE4 mannequin.

in this video at ~33min mark they talk about how to setup the hair for a photorealistic character and mention 3dsmax. I would like to see if it’s not possible to do in blender with particle system + billboards or some other workflow.

You can bake the textures by using a particle system with hair and do the billboards with imdjs’s addon (not free).

Looking forward to this!! Whatever topic you guys scratch in that stream, it´s going to be great! :cool: Blender just generally needs more attention in the gamedev community!

Ue4 tools is great, I use it for making new animations, and experimenting transfering the rig to custom characters (like those from Manuel’s lab) would be nice if we had similar tool/tools as the ART tool in maya.

How does it work so bad Unreal in linux?.. :frowning:

UE4 Tools are great but it would be good to have a tutorial that explains a good workflow without addons just in case something breaks compatablility and UE4 Tools doesn´t work anymore.

While still experimental some of that tool is actually built into Unreal 2.16. It’s a bit clunky to setup at the moment but you can animate a character in Unreal now if you want and it’s built similarly to the ART tool. Pretty soon you may not even need to animate or rig in Blender if you don’t want to.

Yes, I’m really excited about this feature, though probably a long time till we can treat unreal as an animation tool…

Someone explain this to me, because in Blender I will turn on metric units and make a box measuring 60 x 60 x 180cm, then import the .fbx into UE4 and it is roughly the same size as the UE4 mannequin. It seems to export 1:1 so why is conversion required?

Yeah it’s a bit wonky at the moment not exactly straightforward to setup. I do however like how Epic is slowly adding everything in engine. Cloth for example. i don’t ever expect to see a modeler or anything like that in engine but I’d imagine myself doing most everything else in engine at some point.

Maybe it works fine for static meshes but there are issues with 1 unit scale and skeletal meshes. There used to be lots of bugs like physics assets not being created because the bones were too small and when rotating bones in persona it had 1/100 of the effect (rotate 100 degrees and the mesh rotates 1 degree).

I tested now in 4.16 and it seems like most of those bugs have been fixed, however when you import an animation weird things still happen. If you import a skeletal mesh with 1 unit scale the scale of the root bone is set to 100x100x100 which makes it look normal. With an animation however the mesh turns 100 times smaller. With root motion the mesh is normal size but the translation animation on the root bone is 100 times smaller.

I tested this with the new armature root bone fix (naming the rig “armature”). When not using the fix (extra root bone) it kind of works fine but you can’t use root motion (100 times too small).

So, since 1 unit scale brings issues for skeletal meshes using 0.01 unit scale works better, it has no issues at all really.

Cyaoeu: I see, thanks.

It seems like the stream is on the 30th: