Unreal + Blender = worthless!? Isn't it time for Epic to fix that?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hey guys!

I’m a guy who loves blender… it’s so light and fluffy, and has loads of features packed into one program.
However… its fbx exporter is ****… this is due to problems with the licencing terms, and in short blender had to make their own fbx exporter instead… and it don’t work that great.

Since unreal is supposedly made for anyone to make a game, shouldn’t u34 have a blender->fbx converter themselves?

[Edited out stuff]

So, what are your thoughts?

2

@anonymous_user_ac40a5c5,

You seem to have a strong sense of entitlement! Why is it Epic’s responsibility to fix Blender FBX issue? they already done more enough by donating money to the Blender Foundation. Bottomline is complaining about the FBX issue with Blender won’t help get your project done, use another software that has a working FBX exporter. If your a student you can get Autodesk software for FREE and Modo indie is cheap :wink:

3

If Blender’s FBX exporter is broken it’s up to Blender developers to fix it - it’s free and open source so there’s no reason it shouldn’t have a good FBX exporter. More likely it’s the typical problem with Blender - it exposes every knob and button while giving you no guidance or presets, so you’re just not setting up the export properly. UE4 has quite a bit of documentation, and where it lacks direct documentation you can usually find a discussion with meaningful answers in the Answer Hub and forums. Just going to unrealengine->Learn->Documentation and searching for ‘Blender FBX export’ brings up a load of discussions about setting things up properly.

A large part of the community are ‘indie’, but being ‘indie’ doesn’t mean you exclusively use cheap/free software. I like Blender, and I hate Autodesk to the core, but this really isn’t an Unreal problem.

4

@SonKim
Blender is very functionnal when exporting to FBX, the problem is within Unreal 4 integration.

5

What exactly is not working? -> probably we can help you :slight_smile:

Epic already tries to make blender more “UE4 friendly” -> they gave the blender foundation 30.000$ + there are some useful streams about the export/import process: ?v=Ayp1lof0RJU

6

It’s not that it’s epics problem, they can do whatever they want. I guess its just sad that blender is so broken when interacting with epic…
And maybe it’s just my skewed perspective, I admit I got a bit harsh up there, possibly cause I spent 3 hours trying to get the engine from not crashing. I re-edited the post to make it more logical and yeah.

I never knew about the donating, that’s a really good thing. :slight_smile:

So, to simplify the problem: should unreal have a blender -> fbx converter themselves? Would it be legally possible? And would enough people use it?

7

Yeah, what’s giving you grief specifically?

I haven’t had any major dramas getting stuff from Blender to UE4 (at least no more than I do getting stuff from 3ds to Unity).

8

well, there’s several problems.
I have a character, and export it to unreal. It loads all of the actions (animations). However…

  1. If I add a new action, and re-export… it doesn’t detect a new animation!
  2. When I re-export, the entire engine crashes

The second one is new, probably some stupid export mistake done by me. However the 1st one hasn’t been solved since the beginning for me…
Right now I’m deleting all the assets, and I’m going to start exporting fresh… hopefully this will work.

Thanks guys for the help, and sorry for going so out of hand. :wink:

9

I read all the thread but I still not understanding what is the problem you can just simply download this add-on :

https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?34619-ADDON-BLENDER-UE-Tools

The only problem I get with blende is the scale but you just have to scale x25 .

PS :

Can we use the 3ds student version for commercial project? :slight_smile:

10

Wait, WHAT? That’s SO COOL! I never knew this existed! :open_mouth: Countless thanks!

No, commercial is not allowed. Hence me not using it :cry: But still having a 3 year free is pretty awesome

11

Autodesk also has a standalone FBX program, I’m guessing people have messed with it before, but it might be a solution to load the file there and save it to a new FBX file with that before sending to UE4

12

Autodesk has a free FBX convertor. Use that instead of blenders FBX exporter.

13

Blender 2.74 and 2.75 have made big strides, 2.75 in particular is looking pretty good.

14

Oh snap, I didn’t know 2.75 was out!

Yeah 2.47 fixed a huge amount of changes, thankfully.

I’m trying to get the addon to get working, but as usual it’s taking a huge amount of work to find the correct way of exporting and importing things… but I think the addon is the way to go :smiley:

15

I haven’t tested Blender 2.75 yet, but I didn’t see anything noteworthy in the pre-release notes surrounding the FBX exporter.
The addon is nice, but even with 2.74 I had issues with animations being really really tiny when activated in persona. I finally worked through all of that.
This thread has info on what I did to get through the issue: https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?72644-Blender-to-unreal-issue&p=309124&viewfull=1#post309124

A big thing is with 2.74 there is no need to set metric in the world settings panel and on export you leave the scale at 1. Blender 2.74 Binary FBX exporter now treats 1 Blender Unit as 1 Unreal unit.