Hi Team, Quick question (for context I am developing a VR scenario in UE5.1, and using Blender to model my lab environment.)
What is the typical workflow for level models created in Blender to bring into Unreal?
At present I have a great looking rendered model in Blender which has some PBR materials (from Poliigon and others), but I have had great difficulty bringing these textures across on my FBX import. Some textures and colours stick around, other materials simply show up as a white material.
I don’t want to go down the path of baking textures in Blender but it seems like this is a workaround.
I am wondering if many Unreal developers simply bring in the mesh and apply materials in UE?
Unreal’s material system is very powerful. That’s why I never make any complex materials in my modelling software. There I only use simple multi materials. Just basic standard materials with a texture only if I need to see the UV direction and layout on the mesh. Otherwise just a color to tell them apart from each other.
I often use box mapping with 100x100x100 as a starting point for the UVs in the modelling software. I have a library of materials in Unreal that work on that UV scale. Many free materials, like quixel, are based on that scale.
You could use the textures you use in Blender. Best to have them in sizes with a power of 2. Examples are 512x512, 1024x1024, or 512x2048.
Just look into some material tutorials for Unreal. It’s a very important part of working successfully with unreal.
For what it’s worth, if you do “classic” game level design, you’ll probably want a 4x4m UV scale so that you can build a texture that maps an entire wall from bottom to top. (game levels will typically use 4m ceiling height to be roomy enough.) Because of that scale, you’ll typically want to use at least 2k textures; each texel will be about 2mm in real-world size in that case (a little more than 1/16th of an inch for those using Freedom Units.)
If you do modern level design, then the entirety of the wall is modeled (chair rails, kick boards, crown mouldings, the whole shebang) so you can get away with smaller base UV maps, as long as you also use some kind of light variation texture mapped in world space or at least tiling UV space so that you don’t get that super-annoying 1 meter repeat.
My point with the 100x100x100 box mapping was that all objects that use the same material have the same UV scale. Otherwise you would need to make a new material instance for each object.
You can use 400 by 400 UVs on the wall or you can use 100 by 100 UVs and then scale them in the material by 0.25 with exactly the same result. It doesn’t matter as long as you stick to your rule.
Repeated patterns can be a problem if the textures are not tiling well. There are ways to add noise within the material but best to have a good texture as a base.