Texturing issue after import

[joshbell56]

I need help…bad. I have scoured the interwebs searching for a solution and I just can’t seem to find the exact problem I’m having.

I have a purchased character from CGTrader that I’ve had to re-rig in Blender to get the mesh to work with the animations that I want to use. It has been the biggest nightmare. Anyways, I finally got a working skeleton and everything weight painted properly and now, wouldn’t you know it I have a different issue. Now when I export the character into unreal (UE5.2) the materials don’t properly load onto the character. I have followed numerous tutorials, bought add-ons for both Blender and UE, nothing seems to fix the issue. The best I can come up with is that it has to be some kind of importing error but then again, there’s times where I’m pretty sure its the mesh itself. I can’t seem to narrow down what’s causing the issue.

Literally all I’ve done is remove the original skeleton and add in one that is compatible with the UE5 skeleton, and added some weight paints for the mesh to move properly. This has been entirely without any textures on the blender side. I have imported the textures separately into my project. The mesh has the exact same groups for the materials as if I had just imported the model without the skeleton changes so I’m not sure what to do.

Here’s an image of what the character is supposed to look like:

and here’s what it’s doing:

Please help because I’ve spent a very long time trying to get this particular character to work properly and I’m at my wit’s end with it.

[ClockworkOcean]

I know nothing about animations a weight painting, but I do know that materials won’t make it from Blender to UE.

You get the UVs right in Blender, but then you have to manually move the textures from Blender to UE, and make the material yourself.

[MostHost_LA]

@ClockworkOcean

you have to manually move the textures from Blender to UE, and make the material yourself.

This should really be the default with everything, any pipeline, any software.
Shaders can be somewhat standardized, but having either a master instance in which you swap in textures, or a custom shader for each material is the only way to go.

If you want to somewhat cheat or learn about different character materials you can look at any of the paragon characters for that.

Assuming your model came with all the proper textures, drop them in an engine folder, and create your materials.
Some textures obviously made it in alright, as you have some normal mapping in place, some yellows/blues, even purple.
The rest is probably missing or done with mixed layer materials.

You can examine blender materials, understand them, and replicate them in engine quite similarly - IF - the model came set up for blender that way.

This being the original product:

SCIFI - SPACE SOLDIER | 3D model

You can probably try importing it from maya with live link or whatever else they use these days.

PS:
From the screen-caps there it’s looking like the colors/stuff that made it into the model are all metals, so base colors are set in the blender material and got created/ported over.

Since personally I uncheck the option to import material stuff from blender, I wouldn’t know where to start with that. I find you are just better off creating what you need one by one…

PPS:
Point behind importing from Maya is that it should create the right materials for you (in theory?), you can then instance them and apply them to the mesh you fixed up.

PPPS:
wondering why the “UnrealEngine (.uasset) (2 files)” wasn’t properly animating/working for you. but also “wtf is it exactly?” since a character usually has at least 3 base uasset files (skeleton, mesh, phat asset), and materials files on top of it.

[joshbell56]

I think there’s been a misunderstanding here. The textures/materials never entered blender. I imported the textures directly to UE from separate files. I’ve tried re-making the materials and it doesn’t work on certain parts of the updated skeletal mesh and I can’t figure out why because nothing with the mesh itself changed, except for weight paints and the skeleton.

This is what my blender screen looks like at the moment.

It was exported directly to Unreal just like this. Then, I imported the textures from a file folder.

But, if I run the project that that model comes in, the materials/textures work just fine. The downloads also include .max files, .c4d files, .ma files, and .fbx files, so I’m not sure what it was originally made in exactly.

The creator says the skeleton the mesh comes with is compatible with the UE manny skeleton and the UE4 skeleton but it’s not. The bones have weirdly named names, there’s missing ik bones, it’s oriented to the Y axis instead of the X axis, etc…it’s been a nightmare just trying to get the animations I have from the UE marketplace to work with the provided skeletal mesh. So, I just decided to completely redo the skeleton. Used Game Rig Tool for the UE skeleton and weight painted so the mesh would move with the skeleton and then exported using Pipeline: Send to Unreal to make sure everything exported properly and with the correct settings. At no time did I ever touch any textures in Blender, they were never loaded into it.

This is the one that comes with the character for download:

Here’s the second one it comes with:

and there’s like 2 more.

[Geodav]

ok if i read correctly then you have 2 uasset , 1 of these should be the complete character, so you could use the material that comes with that and apply it to your rigged mesh, blender has always been quirky with other file formats, i suggest you export the character from UE (the uasset) then import into blender, remove the rig/weights and rerig.

[joshbell56]

Did some testing, so the model has individual parts, (that’s how the weight paints are so accurate). If I don’t join the parts, they all export to UE as the individual parts, BUT, the materials work just fine. The problem seems to come from joining the parts together, after export, that’s where the materials stop working on some of the parts of the mesh. Not sure how to fix that…

[joshbell56]

Seems I’m taking the modular approach. Importing each part of the mesh individually fixed the texture issue. So, as a work around, I’m just combining each mesh into one inside of UE. May take a performance hit but it’s the best I’ve got right now until a different solution can be found.