For all extensive purposes Blender is still not a good program to use for doing any form of Modding for Unreal. Every version in some form or another loses vital data when opening fbx files. Either it loses LOD data, Texture Data, or even more importantly Sections partitioned to specific LODS to different texture materials. In some form or another you are battling uphill trying to find out why a skeletal mesh you export out and back in loses data of some kind. This is also not counting the fact that very few version of Blender even allow proper exporting with added plugins.
It’s no fire and forget. However I still prefer Blender for everything (and I don’t miss anything). I paid for a subscription for Maya years ago, did tutorials and tried to love it but my brain was already heavily Blender-wired at that point in time. Rotate something is “R” at Y … is “Y” or relative “YY”. Animating killed it for me. In Maya I had to learn Kung-Fu for all those mouse-shortcuts, the keyboard ones are weak and I had still to touch those gizmos (by mouse). But if you start … and are not already addicted to Blender you can give Maya a try (should work better from import/export). Textuers does not really matter for me. I do the painting in 3dcoat anyway (app-link with Blender) that outputs me UE-format PBR textures stacked into channels (like green for metal, …) and usually I create the mats (once) in UE afterwards (that remain at reimport).
I did manage to finally get Blender to work better with the import/export system to Unreal for the most part that is. There’s some huge variations between versions of blender that make editing or modifying anything a real pain though. For instance, version 4.4.0’s sculp feature actually expands the sections of the vertices without breaking a mesh or leaving cracks of unfilled space. While a version like 3.6.5 the sculpt feature cracks the mesh leaving blank spaces between any sections you inflate or enlarge in anyway. While the export add ons work wonders with unreal for version 3.6.5, but don’t for 4.4.0.
Right now the only issue I’m having is trying to remove a few parts from a mesh without it somehow breaking the bone structure heirarchy it is tied to. I’m working with gear that is already made to work for a Biped_Skeleton in unreal. I’m just trying to add variations of the gear using the mesh, but when I make a few alterations, it somehow fails to merge back to the bones properly. I’m sure if I fiddle with it enough I can figure out what it’s doing.
There’s also the fact that if you export any FBX file out of unreal with any materials attached to it into Blender 3.6.5 they will be lost entirely from the file. Whereas if you export a file from unreal the exact same way with the same settings and import it into Blender 4.4.0 all the materials are properly assigned.
There is also another issue I find to be really annoying with some files gear that have any sort of ChaosClothingSim animations tied to sections of it. either it be a coat tail, sash, handbag, or whatever you added some physics to to create a more fluid gear piece without adding physics to the entire item. A lot of these types of added features are also not save properly in fbx format. Either the mesh itself is not inline with the sculpt of the item thats animated etc. Also the animated section tends to lose it’s material thats tied to it. It definitely makes for a lot of extra work in trying to go back and edit or make changes.
If you already dominate Blender, and are familiar with Rigify, you may find this useful.
I made this addon as a solution for anyone who does animations in Blender and wants a simplified integration when sending human rigs to Unreal engine.
Here’s a short playlist on how the addon works integrating with Unreal:
NOTES:
Blender is not able to reorient the bone’s axies because it’s internally coded that way.
*No fbx setting or .py script will ever deal with this unless a fully written c++ integrating with all the rigging modules for internal code gives UI access for the user to re-orient bones. *
All other objects/particles “origin” and “axies/axes” can be re-oriented in the UI while mantaining “it’s shape”. Not the Bones.
This is why you always see Unreal FBX bone rigs importing into Blender with different axies points.
I’ve since resolved my issue through trial and error with this procedure. I even managed to get Blender 4.4.0 to work just fine importing and exporting files to and from with no issues.