So I just saw this discussion about unit conversions. I had a bit of difficulty trudging through the details here due to the heat of the discussion, so I’m wondering if you could restate the workflow you would recommend for modeling in Blender for UE4.
well personally I just leave blenders units at the default of “none” and use 1 blender unit as 1CM, so if I want something to be lets say 144CM/1.44M tall in UE4 I just make it 144 units tall in blender.
if you want to use metric change blenders units to “metric” and set the scale in the units panel to 0.01 so blender knows there is 100 units in a metre, that way (to use my previous example) if you make something 1.44M in blender it will be 144CM/1.44M in UE4.
hope that clears things up for you:)
Founded more information about modular seams in lightmap UV:
://www.worldofleveldesign/categories/udk/udk-lightmaps-03-how-to-fix-light-shadow-lightmap-bleeds-and-seams.php
The wiki page really needs some updates, espacially about UV unwrapping.
That example screenshot of lightmass UVs is showing very practice. Stretched UVs are not an issue for lightmass but non-straigt edge are since they are prone to aliasing/bleeding artifacts. Should look more like this: ://abload.de/img/ue_lightmapuvs0013fsxq.png
Some possible workflows:
- using ‘Follow Active Quads’ unwrap
- straighten some edges manually, pin those verts and re-unwrap
- straighten all edges manually
Also you should never ever suggest to use Lightmap Pack. Scratch that. It’s adding one UV island per mesh face and therefore increases the total vert count to the possible maximum (similarily to a completely flat shaded object).
Regarding the scale discussion I’m fully with . Using modified grid settings also means to have higher precision and working faster sometimes (e.g. moving vert/faces/edges by a certain amount via numerical input).
Sometimes having some example files can help so I’ve just put together 3 example .blend files that import successfully into Unreal 4.1. These files have the Blender units changed from ‘None’ to ‘Metric’ with scale ‘0.01’ ( so that 1m in Blender == 1m in UE4, I’m used to working in similiar fashion to vBalbio). The clip distance in the view & the camera clip distance have been adjusted and the display lines are spaced 1m apart. Each of the meshes is a simple cube with 2 crappy UV maps (diffuse & lightmap).
Each of the meshes shows up as 1m x 1m x 1m in both Blender & UE4. I use the static mesh one as my default Blender file so that when I start new meshes all the scale settings are correct. They are all very simple, feel free to muck around with them as you wish.
I figured sharing these might help if someone is having problems with scale between Blender 2.7 & UE4.1
This is a great tutorial. I was able to export just a simple wall 5.12m/2.56m/1.28m from blender over to unreal, and the size was prefect. However, when I dragged one of the default materials over to it, the material was scaled way too big… is this something I did wrong when I did the UVUnwrap? Please help with this, it’s driving me mad. Thanks!
When I import my FBX files and bring up the static mesh editor in UE4, it will have several materials listed as “Element 0” “Element 1” etc. Sometimes the number of elements matches the number of materials I had in Blender, but sometimes there are extra ones and it’s split out sections of the mesh differently. Is there a way to have it pull in the actual material names instead of “Element 0” and can anyone shed light on why it sometimes makes more materials in UE4 than what I had in Blender?
open the material, add a “texture coordinate” node and change the UTiling/VTiling, should fix it:).
I don’t think so as those are just the material slots and not the actual materials, also if you import materials/textures with your fbx it does import them with the names you give them in blender.
I’ve never had that.
i keep seeing this quoted as a fact, but i’d like to know what exactly is wrong with using lightmap pack? what does UE not like about it?
its not that EU4 doesn’t like it (it should technically work), its more to do with the fact it wont give you a good (or optimized) lightmap, to be more specific using the lightmap pack splits every face into its own UV island witch means 1:you would need to set the lightmap res in UE4 really high even on fairly small models for them to have decent shadows 2:if you have lots of meshes in your scene (witch you often will) it would take forever to build the lighting even in quite small scenes 3:there would be a performance cost.
for most lightmaps you want to have as few UV islands as possible with 3 or 4 (I prefer 4) pixels of padding between UV islands witch then allows you to set the lightmap res lower while still having good looking shadows, its basically a balancing act between shadow quality/ light build time and performance, blenders lightmap pack doesn’t really do any of those.
hope that helps:)
This is a great thread. Thanks to everyone for all the info. Wouldn’t it be better to make video tutorials on a lot of these subjects. The wiki is great, don’t get me wrong there. It’s just I know that some people can get what you guys are talking about. But, if this is for people that are total noobs in the Blender/UE4 world. Reading on the wiki and a few screenshots is not enough to get the point across. No disrespect intended. Thank you for the Wiki. I just thought I would throw that out there. There isn’t any detailed video tutorials on this subject. If there is I haven’t found them. There are however tutorials in video form that the person trying to teach always cuts short by saying “I am not gonna show you that.” or “I am not going to do that.” I would make the tutorials myself, But I am just learning UE4 too. So from the outside looking in or vice versa. It would be cool to see someone make some detailed video tutorials about these subjects.
Thanks to all for the very useful wiki!
I’ve setup my Blender units as instructed and it works well in UE4, however I observed one problem - if I set the clip end-range in Blender to the value suggested in the wiki (1km) Blender starts producing see-through artifacts even if "Limit selection to visible’ is turned on. Even for lower values such as 500m or even 50m this occurs. Looking at some old threads on the Blender forums it seems this is expected behavior when the clip is set to large values. Any idea how this can be fixed?
My current models are pretty smallish (couple of metres ) so I manage to get away with setting the clip to 10m, but the setup starts to get a bit unpredictable for larger objects. Also once Blender supports UE4 style navigation controls I’m probably going to be doing larger pieces of my scene here so there’s that.
Here’s an image with one such example.
Note the shaded artifacts on the sides of the mesh in Edit mode and the see-through like behavior even though ‘Limit selection to visible’ is on.
UE4 style navigation? You mean like an FPS camera? If you press Shift + F you get an FPS type camera and then when you’ve moved to wherever you wanted you press the left mouse button.
I’ve used Shift-F before but I just tried Blender 2.71 and woah! Shift-F here works just like the UE style navigation controls including Q/E for up/down/etc. I had no idea this was already released so thank you for reminding me to check Shift-F! In previous Blender versions the FPS cam was arguably clunky to use but 2.71 feels like the real deal.
BTW does anyone have any idea on the see-through artifacts I alluded to in my previous post?
I wanted to understand how the scale correctly when i export to Blender in UE4
I followed your guide, so i set up everything like is show in the " Unit Scale in Blender " part.
I also left the 1.0 value in the fbx exporter and when i import in UE4, i get this.
I just imported the standard blender cube.
I also tried to set the 50 value in the exporter and i have no warning and a 100x100x100 size, that should be correct i guess.
Why i get this warning? Where’s the mistake?
AFAIK the standard Blender cube remains unaffected even after you’ve setup your units because it was spawned before the changes.
Try scaling that cube by 100 and Ctrl-A -> ‘Apply Scale’ or just model something afresh. Assuming you’ve set the scale factor (under metric) to 0.01 if you extrude any face by 100 units that will work out to be 1 metre. Also turn edge length on (hit N’ in Edit Mode, look under ‘display’) until you get things working right so you can be sure that your units are correct in Blender first. I suspect your cube will read 2cm currently instead of 2m.
most of that information is very misleading, it used to be more accurate but someones changed it.
if your model is that small why does the edge you’ve highlighted say its 100M’s in length?, I think you might need to change your unit scale settings.
the default blender cube is only 2x2x2 units witch in UE4 is still 2x2x2cm, that’s why scaling up by 50 during export gives you a cube of 100x100x100 in size.
I think both of your issues is caused by how your setting up your units and/or scale, If you tell me how your doing it I should be able to tell you a way to fix it.
Hey , the image from my post in August was a dummy model to demonstrate the issue of artificats with large clip sizes. I haven’t had any issues with my actual models at all as most of these are less than 2m so I suspect I read the more accurate version of the wiki.
My settings: Blender units set to Metric + Scale set to 0.01 for convenience + Clip size between 1mm to 10m (as opposed to the prescribed 1km) + leave scale untouched on export.
I’ve found skeletal meshes a bit more tricky but usually mange to scrape through after applying transformations/rotating about Z/use pose0 as reference pose in import, etc.
Hey I’m wondering if you can help me out. I’m kinda new to blender and UE4. I made a basic door mesh with a window in it. The first time i imported into unreal the texture came with it and also the windows tint color did put it was not transparent. So i went to change the alpha level(heard that might fix my transparent window) and now when I import it again none of my materials or textures are coming with it… not sure what I’m doing wrong but no matter what i try i cannot get it back. Also not sure if this matter but somehow i have 2 different uv unwarps one with the texture for the door and another thats blank for the windows somehow. for example if i have the uv editor open and click on the window it brings up the blank uv but if i click anywhere else the one with the texture appears. Any help would be awesome this is driving me nuts