I certainly wouldn’t mind a PBR/tesselation shader for the viewport. Nor the disney principled brdf (that apparently is fast becoming a standard) in Cycles. But Epic wants FBX, and I think I agree that getting your models and animations into the engine is the first order of business for UE4 users.
If you’re meaning the viewport in part, in my opinion, I doubt we’ll see a viewport shading overhaul to PBR technology until the Viewport FX project finally gets done.
The way it’s set up is intended to provide a base for other developers to build their own shading systems, drawing optimizations, and the like (with the initial end result being mainly a reimplementation of what the viewport can do right now). People are really wanting to make sure that they don’t step on Jwilken’s toes as he hammers out what’s likely his final project phase, which is understandable because we would really like to see it get done.
If you want a comparison, it was the same with the stagnation of modeling tool development while Bmesh was being worked on, but boy did the floodgates for new tools open up when it was finally in.
Well, Viewport FX is just a few weeks down the road, and this GSoC is finally the one where the project is supposed to be mergeable at the end. I’m really looking forward to it 
Hi guys… I am playing with the ue4 in these days and both blender 2.7 and 2.71 are able to export animated skeletal fbx files to ue4 without any apparent problems.
Of course mine are just test, I do not know if some issue would come out in a production situation, but still, my test were good! Imported different meshes with simple rigs and animations.
With that said, the news of epic supporting the fbx development of blender is a great great news!
@ideasman42: Why not to contact Epic, explain concerns over Autodesk causing incompatibilities with FBX exported by Blender and ask Epic to always maintain 7.4x format so that no matter what Autodesk does to FBX format specs, UE4 will always open Blender exported FBX files ? (or have UE4 import ascii FBX files)
Because there is no evidence that the next FBX version will be a significant change (7.3 -> 7.4 are quite similar for example).
And its too much speculation at this point. Probably next version with have a few changes and we can support them. (or skip from 7.4 -> 7.8… or whatever makes sense for us).
You can always update old FBX files with autodesk FBX converter.
Why are minor game studios able to use this FBX SDK and we somehow can’t get our hands on it?
The SDK is not compatible with the GPL that is why we cannot use it
Anyone can get their hands on it, we’re just not allowed to utilize it because it conflicts with the GPL licence of Blender.
Now that is just incredible nice of them! I’d imagine that 10k will be incredibly useful for Blender. Here’s hoping more donations come around!
The feature requested by Epic for this money is very important to us game developers. Four years ago I was working on a project using Blender to model, rig, & texture characters for a game project I was working on. Whilst I, personally, could animate the characters in Blender, the artist hired for animation was a Maya user. A pipeline allowing communication to/from Maya for animated characters was just not possible at the time. Collada was… well, broken and FBX was simply not an animation option. I really look forward to an FBX pipeline, both in & out of Blender 
Is the source code available? Nothing stops learning the code and implementing everything in Blender. Even Epic stated that people can learn from UE4 and use knowledge to make/improve their own engine.
As Campbell points out, the code for the FBX import/export library is not available. If it was, a clean-room description of the FBX file format would almost be a guaranteed outcome, at which point AutoDesk loses it’s power over the format. Have a look at Collada - a variety of different implementations, each with their own flaws, and all incompatible with one another.
The upside & downside of FBX is there is one working implementation. The upside is that with one working implementation, incompatibilities are hard to come by. The downside is that there is one working implementation and it’s controlled by Autodesk.