Maybe I’m spoiled by having a good computer with 64gb of ram to boot, but I have never found the blender UI to be slow in the past year.
Even faster since I started using the gfx studio drivers.
I’m normally working tons of polygons, and an unwrap of 30k tris or more does take 20 to 30 min. The trick is to work in such a way you never need to unwrap 30k tris or quads actually at once.
Regardless of that. I made my own tools for compatibility, and the FBX format is anything but Close.
you can find all the specs you need to integrate things (like I did for animation curves).
What’s more is that most of the work is pre-done in the exporter for anyone wanting to take the time to modify it.
LODs are essentially already there too. They just work awkwardly, and it’s best to my workflow to script them in as only taken into account when ans empty is starting with LOD_
that’s actually precisely what my curves plugin does.
Is it a nuisance to have to export to FBX and manually import? Sure.
is it a game changer to your workflow?
absolutely not.
In fact, I don’t even import materials, often I create the proper material instance before import using the correct variety of automated material, and the import process just assigned the correct unreal material for me based on name alone.
Having Materials come in from blender is bs anyway. Half the textures would be missing as I believe only the diffuse is packed to the FBX. Naturally, that’s also something easy to change, I for one (probably like many blender coders) do not see a point.
All that in mind, I have to admit that I was so disappointed over the lack of tools that I spent my first month coding said tools to achieve a stable production environment.
And I do offer said plugins free of charge despite the obvious cost to me of doing so.
And speaking of free stuff, having Mr. Lima in this thread (yet terribly OT), what’s the status of the community ocean project with .24 ?
Oh, and adding on to the topic at hand, keep in mind that Epic seems dead set against publishing my plugin for blender in a similar fashion as they do with their ArtV2 plugin. I take this to mean they intend to create their own set of tools.