I have to say thanks a ton for releasing UE4 for free - I couldn’t have afforded the subscription for the long journey of learning!
I’ve been a Blender artist for around a decade now and have been working for some small games here and there - always wanting to create my own games. Now I feel with UE4 I could make it - even as a single person.
My biggest problems are around the import of meshes - for me it’s a error-prone and time consuming process. I know from other game engines how game objects need to be set up, still there are a lot of pitfalls with UE4 / Blenders exporter. Using Blenders exporter often fails completely for no apparent reason, just to work on the second try without any changes. Using Autodesks converter (Blender -> 3DS -> Autodesk -> FBX) kills the smoothing groups.
Another problem for me includes the lightmapping for polygon-rich objects, no UV overlapping allowed, but too small, non-overlapping UVs still throw an overlapping error. These and more problems, combined with the relativly slow speed of the importer just consumes a lot of time.
Could it be possible to write an exporter with Python in Blender for a more native UE4 format? If this transition, preferably both ways, worked more seemles, man Blender + UE4 would be a ridiculously powerfull toolset.
Anyway, you’re doing an awesome job and I’m happy everyday to have the opportunity to learn and play with UE4.
Which blender version are you using? 2.75 has fairly decent fbx exporter, which supports multiple texture coordinates among other things. I certainly haven’t ever seen this thing fail.
Would you mind uploading some simple example that causes problems?
Actually, now that I thought about it, I remember having a problem. IIRC exporter went berzerk because some material names had either dots or underscores in them, so I had to shorten names. Is that the issue you had?
After another day of trial and error, as well as some 3rd party videos, I figured out the important “switches” - no more errors at import! Also it seems 4.10 imports fbx a lot faster than 4.7.
Have a clean, triangulated mesh, set smooth / flat shading in Edit Mode for Faces!
Apply all modifiers, rotation, scale etc. before export
Have a proper UV unwrap
Have a second UV layer for lightmapping - that way you don’t need to care about your “real” UVs
Create a collision object right away in Blender using the correct naming convention UCX_objectname
In the exporter change smoothing from Normal to Faces. Uncheck “leaf bones”
At import it’s ok to import “Materials” so the assignment is right there (saves time), but don’t import textures, don’t autogenerate colision.
After import go to mesh edit, under Static Mesh Settings find Lightmap Coordinate Index, set it to 1 for the second UV layer, adjust your lightmap resolution
Create materials etc.
Profit
Maybe it would be a time saver to create a Python script that wraps the exporter and handles all the stuff in Blender. I think you could automate parts of it.
Left: Tree leaves UV layout complete
Right: Zoom in - tiny UVs
The lightmapping UVs still give me a bit of a hard time, although the above helped me to bring down the error from 95% to 1.5%. I was unable to find a proper tutorial or docs about this - at least one that I could understand.
The mesh causing problems in this case is a tree with lots of leaves. Every leaf shares the same UV coords and the UVs are basically a square. For the lightmapping UV layer I used Blenders “Pack Islands” function that separates them into one none-overlapping UV layout with adjustable space in between. I think the problem is about the space and the lightmap resolution. I accidently set the resolution in UE4 to 8192 believing it was a pixel resolution - which completely crashed my system
I’m using the latest Blender version 2.76 btw.
So I’m sorry for my inappropriate critics, I’m just a UE-noob.
