Blender intergration, and hope for a linux native editor in the future

Development Platform & Builds
, , , ,
1

I am curious roughly how many people have actively requested better blender asset intergration? and how soon can it be expected? I saw it discussed in an official live stream, that it was being raised by the community.

It is one of my only sore points with UE4, if this question is deemed unanswerable, just add this as another vote toward facilitating it as a feature. Even if just by posting an example of how to integrate such a plugin to the blender community to fully facilitate and invite C++ blender programmer/s to tackle it?

FBX is definitely not ideal in many cases Static meshes are fine, however my experience with animation is entirely unsatisfactory and broken. while I am currently involved in a student project and have access to academic licenses of autodesk software, this is not something I want to worry about in the future.

I know a modest community of aspiring devs and upstarts that plan to use blender as their 3D suite of choice and would love to be able to boast a robust support for it by UE4, as it really is an industry class tool. So kinda advocating on their behalf too.

Also not so much a question, just letting you guys know I got an engine subscription day one, and it prompted me to re-install Windows, after a year of ditching it in favour of Linux. So yet another vote for a linux native editor from me also!

(Something that got me majorly excited was something I had prototyped last year with blender’s GLSL node system, which is fundamentally identical to the layered material system, yet I had no real way to easily apply in a production, no other publicly available engine i am aware of do it, and blender game engine is limited, and no contender to Unreal, so to see that pipeline i already formed a deep understanding of being a core feature of Unreal 4 was utterly awesome)

I’ve been trying out dozens of engines over the past few years, looking to find the tool i want to use to create my first substantial and well actually finished game, and been dissatisfied by all of the engines tried. Been trying to go it indie, so productivity is hugely important to me, nothing quite lived up to that need, and i didn’t get much further than quick tech demos before i got sick of code-centric pipelines as an art-centric person. Or frustrating limitations in some form or another. You guys have nailed that, and I can’t state how awesome that is!

Probably wouldn’t have been so incredibly wordy if you guys hadn’t promoted your desire to hear from the community, keep up the awesome work guys!

2

I think this is something that can also happen from the Blender side of things. .FBX is a pretty robust format, but the .FBX exporter for Blender may need to become more mature.

3

true, but the biggest issue is that due to the propriety nature of FBX, the blender community/programmers have to reverse engineer the format for it’s implementation, this takes an incredibly large amount of effort and is going to ensure it’s left behind for quite some time. it’s not really a reasonable task, at the moment UE4 utilizes the FBX SDK spec Version 7.3, and blenders the output of blenders FBX is reported by UE4 as 6.1, and the importer/exporter have been worked on rather extensively from what i read, I’m not sure how long the format is going to take to become “mature” it’s quite a mess, I do not envy the guys working on the plugins, the inability to mix non GPL compatible licenses is a thorny issue i wish didn’t exist, and from what i read there is some aspect that has made importing the ascii format prohibited.so no matter what it’s going to remain extremely messy :confused:

was collada really going nowhere? reading back on it, seemed promising, kinda frustrating that autodesk put all their might behind pushing a proprietary format instead of bolstering collada further or make FBX an open standard, seems anti competitive at glance no matter how robust the format is

4

There’s an SDK for the fbx format with python bindings - I don’t think it is fair to say that the spec needs to be reverse engineered. You do raise an interesting point regarding GPL compatibility though. Not sure what the solution there is.

5

This → “since we can’t link to or include non-GPL-compliant software” ← is holding back blender BIG TIME

6

I don’t think that applies to the addons or plugins - some of which are for sale. Most if not all of the import export functionality is handled by addons.

7

And what is broken in the FBX animation files coming from blender ?
Maya → FBX → Unreal is no picknick either you have to watch your bind pose, make sure you skeleton is laid out properly, and a lot of other subtle issues especially when using FBX Animation Importing…

If you can start another thread with specific animation importing issues from blender to Unreal, with examples and what goes wrong, I’m certain Epic can look at this, as it is there’s been some strange behavior prior to the public release in how it(UE4) treated certain information embedded in the FBX like textures, normals etc… so maybe it’s an oversight.

8

mhm okay, well I’ll refrain from conjecture and try to see what the situation really is at the moment, if you haven’t watch the UE4 twitch stream with the programmers discussion even they likened it to a reverse engineered solution, and from what i read it was. so if what you’re stating and implying is true… I’ll do some research and seek follow up by the community find out what is really going on… if it is as easy as you make it sound we need a donation drive or something to get people onto this fulltime or something

9

This thread on the forums shows some community work on a Blender importer, but it sounds like this might be a tricky problem:

10

I think you have the wrong idea of what Epic does. Blender may need a fundraiser to fix FBX support to make it more compliant, and that’s on them since they don’t charge like Autodesk.

But on the Epic side, they have strong relationships with Autodesk, as well as Nvida, AMD, and others since they’re typically on the forefront of graphics engine development, and push the feature set to what their customers need.

Now the Price Drop from $100,000.00 - $1M per license to $20.00 per customer has brought on a whole new audience, and that’s very cool, but it’s not in epic’s interest to code for every odd-ball derivative of FBX that’s out there. With the source code you could implement a blender to UE4 plugin without having to go through FBX, that used to be the case with (ActorX) UE3 and before. It was dropped because each package needed dev time.

I know I’m lecturing, and I apologize, I just don’t want you to get the idea that epic has changed their support/focus on professional tools. If blender supports the FBX standard it should work fine until then, it’s a blender issue and not Epic’s. If the Blender Generated FBX’s work elsewhere but not in epic’s code, then you have a legitimate bug, and that can then be addressed. (in a new thread).

11

the translation and rotations from anything but keyframe 1 seems to be completely arbitrary, it works in the sense it imports the skinned mesh fine and the correct amount of keyframes, but the result is garbage. All the translations scales and rotations of the bones seem not to match what I originally did, I did simple tests to remove some of the general universal complications like you mentioned, I’ll do more testing but yeah so far they haven’t boded well.

from research it’s the same issue with other FBX versions of that SDK number “maya2011’s default fbx exporter from what I read”, and my attitude has changed a bit after some more research, the fbx tools available hopefully will provide a viable solution, I’ll update this thread or as you suggested start a new one to help problem solve the issues, there is even a blender to UDK to FBX converter workaround I’m reading about, so worst case I’ll just do that until there is some progress from epic or the blender devs

12

okay my reaction was slightly knee jerk and borne of frustration, it’s not as bad as I thought, but it’s still not as straightforward as it should be, I’ll just work with the current workarounds available, and keep up hopes in the epic and blender devs to have it all sorted out in the near future the intent is there :slight_smile:

still think a fundraiser for unreal 4 plugins for UE4 would be nice, if any devs do such a thing I’d throw them quite a generous donation :smiley:

13

Here’s the portal with all the links to the documentation and the SDK Autodesk | 3D Design, Engineering & Construction Software

It seems like it’s pretty well supported on the Autodesk side, there’s training videos and the whole bit. I don’t know though how the GPL compatibility aspect plays into this…

To be fair the existing exporter looks like it’s being actively developed. It would be nice though to get to the place where we are actually exporting material nodes. There’s a certain subset of nodes in blender that have counterparts in UE4 so a certain amount of cross compatibility might be possible.