Beginner question about Blender & Unreal

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hi folks,

I’m totally new to Unreal and only have a year experience with any kind of VFX …
…so be gentle if i say something stoopid!

OK, so i’m making Synthwave type stuff (70’s/80’s inspired animation) and sci-fi stuff in Blender including camera animations through landscapes.

Would it be possible in theory, to keep doing this in Blender, but also bring my project in Unreal (via FBX?) to take advantage of some it’s amazing lighting and in camera effects and realtime DOF?

And then to apply these to only certain parts of the mesh (for example bloom or emission that flares in the camera, or light through fog).

And then to export these (making use of the alpha channel) and bring them back into Blender?

I guess implicit in this idea is the hope that Unreal can import my camera animation / viewpoint? / perspective.

Or am i thinking about this wrong? Should i be looking to take my Blender assets into Unreal, and never go back again?

And as a sort of bonus question, does Unreal have as good camera movement features as Blender? If so, then i guess i should only do modelling in Blender, and do all animation in Unreal?

And just to be clear, i’m not interested in Unreal for game development, only for film.

Thanks in advance!

2

If every object in your blender scene is unique then this is the way to go. If you find that you are duplicating instances of an objects all over the scene, take a look at the datasmith plugin for blender; and you’ll want to export a datasmith file instead of fbx. GitHub - 0xafbf/blender-datasmith-export: Blender addon to export UE4 Datasmith format

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Thanks! … i tried it but it seems you also need to install the UE Datasmith plugin, but unfortunately it’s not compatible with the current version! :frowning: