This is a free add-on I made when I discovered that a bug-free Blender-to-Unreal pipeline was impossible without paid add-ons.
It gives you everything you need for easy exports for game engines, and an easy game animation workflow. Specifically fixes issues with exports for Unreal. Vertex Color tools snuck is as well
Thanks for the contribution.
I donāt use Unreal Engine yet but I plan to, thatās why I just added your addon to my UE related bookmarks. I wonder, out of curiosity: why do you say that other free āSend to Unrealā addons are buggy? As far as I know there should be at least three, if not even five free addons ārecentlyā updated by users that adopt them for their Unreal Engine workflow.
The issue is not that other Blender add-ons are buggy, itās a problem on Unrealās side: Unrealās FBX importer does not perform unit conversion correctly on skeletal meshes, leading to subtle issues.
Blenderās native units are meters, and Unrealās native units are centimeters. FBX files contain unit information, and a game importer should be able to import meters into cm. Unity does this correctly, Unreal has bugs with skeletal meshes.
Most Blender add-ons use the default FBX exporter without modifications, and experience the same issues as a default export ā the one exception I know of is Auto Rig Pro, which can bake-in unit conversions pre-export (which is basically the same thing my add-on does).
Hereās what goes wrong with default Blender exports imported into Unreal.
With UE5.3 and earlier:
This problem is poorly documented (in fact, I canāt find any reliable information about it, and am working on a guide to document it). You might think UE5.4 works fine with Blender, then later hit issues like:
Physics assets not generating correctly.
Random animation graph bugs, when using logic that depends on local transforms.
Finally, here is what a correct import of this character looks like when using the add-on:
One last thing, sorry in advance for taking up space and precious time: does this happen even with glb/glTF format? In case that format works as intended, then why still using the FBX instead of the aforementioned ones to populate UE5 3D scenes?
I donāt know if Unrealās glTF importer has the same bugs, never tried glTF. But Iām going to guess it gets even less support than their FBX importer.
This bridges into a separate topic that Iām not personally well-versed in, but: evidently glTF isnāt really an interchange format in the same way FBX is. You can kind of use it like FBX, but itās not ideal. See:
Collaborate with other projects to create a new 3D interchange format
always great to have more options since Epic abandoned the official UE addon. I was looking at this one as it has static mesh live link update and options to deal with the UE 0,0,0 pivot.
Just wondering if you planned for the same features for static meshes?
Live Link Iām unlikely to support, itās big and demands hooks into a specific Unreal project, which kind of broadens the philosophy behind what this add-on is. It would be nice though.
By ādeal with the UE 0,0,0 pivotā do you mean re-centering a mesh on export? Thatās a handy feature Iāll make a note of it (especially if I add batch exporting).
By the way, the next things Iām working on are:
A compendium of guides for building characters in Unreal, with specifics about Blender for Unreal. A comprehensive guide for this doesnāt exist so Iām working on it. This add-on exists because of that guide.
The next add-on feature Iām eyeing is collection-based batch exporting. Right now the tool is centered around exporting 1 object at a time.
Yes, back when I used 3dsMax the UE bridge tool I used had a handy feature that set and switched pivots from 0,0,0 to the scene pivot in Max. As you know, no matter where your pivot/origin is in Blender when you export, UE will set it to 0,0,0.
