Importing Blender Assets into UE5

Hi,
It’s my understanding that you have to consider things like axis and scale when modelling assets from Blender for UE.
Is there a guide to setting this scale etc? The only things I’ve seen were how to simply import/export. Nothing about how to setup constraints etc.

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In your Blender file, head to Scene Properties > Units and set Unit Scale to 0.01

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You will find that your view distance has been drastically reduced, so open the viewport side panel (N by default), head to View and correct the Clip Start and End values as they will have been scaled down (I usually set them back to 0.01 and 1000 respectively but whatever works for you).

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Any existing objects in the scene will now need to be scaled up 100x to return them to original size, but new objects should be created at the correct size. If you have any constraints with specified distances (i.e. Limit Distance) you will find that they have been scaled down 100x, so you will need to scale them back up.

The same goes for any animations with Location keyframes. I find the best way to correct these is to go into the Graph Editor and set the pivot point to 3D Cursor, ensuring the cursor’s Y position is 0.

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Then hide all curves except for Location, select all keyframes and scale by 100x in the Y direction. You should now find that your animations no longer resemble sleep paralysis demons (if they still do, check through the list to see if any of the channels are locked or hidden when they shouldn’t be - I’ve been bitten by this a few times in the past).

As for axis, I usually use Negative Y as my ‘forwards’ direction. I believe this is the default view direction for Front Orthographic (NumPad1).

Export setting:

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Hope this helps.

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The world origin will always be the root origin of the fbx
if you have multiple objects, you usually want them all at the center
the Unreal Mannequin is approximately twice the height of the default Blender cube.
Make sure to uv everything.

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I find it easier to model to a uniform scale (say 2m in blender representing human height) make your assets, then import into UE5. if it is too small or big, quickly scale in UE5 to your desired size, make a note of the scale value.

In blender on export, input that value into the scale, and it’ll be the right size with minimal screwing around with internal settings.

always using a 2m tall object means you can create a cube in any blend file, model according to that being human height, and things are pretty uniform whem imported into UE5. and if it’s still too big or small, just tweak the value of the export file until it looks right in UE5

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Great answers everyone. Thanks very much. @CL64 your suggestion seems too good to be true :sweat_smile:
I’ll stick to the first suggestion until i get comfortable enough to experiment. THANKS !!

In case you’re wondering why I suggest changing the unit scale in Blender, Unreal appears to scale static meshes and skeletal meshes differently.

A static mesh can be exported just fine with a Blender unit scale of 1, since Unreal knows to automatically scale everything up by 100 (Unreal base units are 1 cm, whereas the Blender base unit would be 1 m).

However if you try to do the same for a skeletal mesh, Unreal doesn’t automatically scale the skeleton properly and you end up with a mismatch (1 blender unit becomes 1 unreal unit, so 1 metre becomes 1 centimetre and the bone positions get scaled down 100x).

I set the unit scale to 0.01 in my default Blender startup file, so I can do both skeletal and static meshes and don’t have to worry.

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Thanks for the clarification. Those are good reasons to use the methods you’ve mentioned.