You should try the UE4tools addon and use their scene tools Set UE Scale button and everything tends to work fine afterwards. Although it would work better if you use it from the start. I think it effectively sets the Unit scale in the Scene settings tab to .01, but it won’t effect your mesh, so it ends up really small. So you gotta scale it upwards afterwards and apply it, but that usually affects your animations probably. Or at least it did with mine. I had to redo them, but i wasnt too far so it was relatively simple to redo. I think that was the only way I could actually export and use skeletal mesh assets from blender without any fuss with the phat editor. The UE4 Tools addon greatly helps speed up the process of animating stuff.
A more friendly import/export format like glTF would be asome!, just imagine: buy some animations → export them to glTF → import into blender, edit, edit and edit → import back into unreal… a perfect, simple and less buggy workflow
I just saw the stream and was curious to know if the link to that destruction VFX build of Blender is up anywhere? I didn’t see it in the Youtube links or in this post anywhere.
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I second this
While on my research on the glTF format, I managed to find out that there was a glTF importer plugin someone made on github. It looks like it’s outdated a little, and I believe it’s only static meshes at the moment. But it looks like someone wrote a plugin to be able to take glTF meshes in unreal about a year ago.
Not sure how well this might work now considering it’s been a year, but at least we can import stuff using this if someone recompiles it for later engine versions like 4.16 or 4.17. This seems to be very promising, so I’m hoping that this stuff goes further.
So, if I start from scratch, should I make a 200m character with a Unit Scale of 0.01?
If you start from scratch (new scene being opened and everything cleared off the scree) all you have to do is set the Unit Scale to .01, length to metric, and then adjust the clip distance in the N options menu. Then off you go. Start modeling, cause everything will use the new unit scale when being created. If you already have a character and you haven’t started rigging yet, set the Unit Scale to be .01, then scale the character by a 100 if he’s tiny (which he usually is) then start rigging.
That’s why I like to use the UE4 Tools add on before I start rigging and animating a character in blender. I just click the set scene size button and that takes care of the stuff for me instead of setting it manually (besides the clip distance maybe). Again though if I modeled the character before i set the scene unit scale, the character might be too small. so I do a scale by 100, apply and then start rigging.
The problems only occur when you start rigging, then realize your scene isn’t the size it should be, then try to scale up the character and rig by 100 after that. It’s only happened to me once (then i started using the add on and started the rig over since i need the practice) so i don’t know too many of the issues that might arise after rigging and needing to scale it to fit the unit scale. Animations screwed up for me so i had to start over since i didn’t know what else to do. Now that i think back i probably could’ve just re key framed it and been fine, but too late to try it now lol.
I believe I should’ve mentioned all the oversights that might occur now.
I just saw the stream and was curious to know if the link to that destruction VFX build of Blender is up anywhere? I didn’t see it in the Youtube links or in this post anywhere. …
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I’ve got the blender Fracture Modifier branch, aka VFX cut|destruction build, information for you guys.
Documentation:
Youtube playlists:
Team members:
Let me know if you have any questions,
Fracture ON!
It will be 2m in the scene, shouldn’t look different than a 1 unit scale scene after scaling and applying object transforms, except it works. 
If it’s from scratch in a 0.01 scene it will be 2m from the start.
You can also set the scene unit scale to 0.01 metric in a new scene and do Save Startup File in File.
This happens because location keyframes are now 100 times too small. You can fix it, in the graph editor put “location” in the search field, to the right set the pivot to 2D cursor, then select all keyframes and scale 100 Y (making sure only the height of the curves change). That should fix the animations after scaling and applying transforms.
How can you import whole models into UE4? Because for me it just imports the model as pieces…
Chances are if your importing separate objects, then it likes to import those objects separately in Unreal. Basically in Blender separate objects = separate meshes. There is a checkbox to combine the meshes though upon seeing the import screen in Unreal.
Fantastic! I’ll be sure to check this stuff out. It seems awesome to try to mess around with.
I would love to explore the Blender to UE4 pipeline further with other tools. If there is someone out there that is really good with Blueprints or C++ and wants to make a little project to test things out, hit me up! Maybe we can make a small game from start to finish to really get into an OSS style process.
Thanks for this talk. Yes I would like to see more work on Blender.
Keep up the good work. As Kevin pointed out some of Blender excels much more expensive industry tools. Can’t wait to see the improved realtime viewport stuff. We have been using the material nodes for over a year (in blender render not cycles) and its awesome.
I too have experimented with various methods how to be able to make new or edit existing animations in Blender for UE4. Unfortunately I’m no expert, but still would like to share what I found.
I use both ue4 tools and the unrigify setup (Blenderman). Both works well for animation creation and export. Ue4 tools animations are easier to retarget, but on the other hand rigify has integration with other addons. For example there are more than one daz3d importers which automaticly rig the imported characters with the rigify rig and then with the unrigify script it’s easy to export to ue4.
About mixamo: I couldn’t get them into blender unfortunately: neither fbx nor collada worked for me. I could use bvh and makewalk, almost good, but feets are sliding a little and ofc no fingers.
Actually I’ve just found a way to do it: the mixamo animations retargeted to the rigify rig seem to be export back into unreal well. now if I could just retarget t inside Blender ot the original rigify rig…
edit: I tested it a bit further, and found that while the animation and skeleton looks perfect the rest pose is “strange” I don’t quite understand whats going on and how to fix it if possible at all. it seems the restpose (precisely the hip orientation) is dependent on the animation somehow. I guess the problem is that no proper root bone has been exported, but I don’t know why. I’d be glad if someone who understand stuffs more than me would look into it .