Hi,
Quick questions. I made a scene in Blender of a ship. The upper deck is easy as to other bottom level which is a lot of new objects and instances. I want to know the best way to replicate the same scene from Blender to Unreal. I would like to make all objects transformations at their center while instancing as much as I can.
Any thoughts is appreciated.
Vivienne
It is easy, all you need to do is export your blender scene as FBX. This is a common interchange format that is supported by Unreal. You can either do it object by object by selecting the Selected objects checkbox in Blender or you can export them all together. Then when you import into the content browser in unreal, they will all keep their locations relative to the origin.
The only thing that might catch you out is scale. Unreal uses units of 1cm whereas Blender uses units of 1m. So the default cube is huge in real life, each side is 2m long. So, depending upon how you have blender set up, you might need to scale as you export from blender or scale as you import into Unreal. Basically, it is better to work at proper 1:1 scale so you don’t have to worry about it in future.
So, is the scene saved as an FBX file when imported into Unreal become one static mesh or several?
Just so you know, I use Maya, not Blender but was wondering the same thing about importing scenes. (Don’t know if that changes anything)
I know a little bit about Maya from watching other people’s youtube videos but have not used it myself. Basically, I think you get a static mesh (or skeletal mesh) per object in Maya. So within an object you can have as many mesh pieces as you want - UV Shells I think they are called in Maya - it will still be imported as one mesh.
Your choice of origin depends on whether you are expecting to have multiple instances of the mesh. If you are kit-bashing and therefore expecting to have multiple instances, then you would put your origin somewhere useful for the piece rather than using the origin of the entire scene. So for example, for a door that you expect to use multiple times, the origin would be most useful to be on the ground on the side of the door where the hinge would go (so you can rotate on the Z axis using that side easily) and would not be set relative to the scene origin. And this principle would apply to wall pieces, streetlights, road pieces, wall pieces, all kinds of things you know you will have more than one of.
But if you have hero pieces that are only used once in a scene, like a fountain or a big building you are never going to be able to go inside, you would probably set the origin relative to the scene. And anything bigger than a house you would probably split into pieces anyway, for technical reasons.
Thank you all