Unreal to Blender and vice versa pipeline with Python

After watching “Python in Unreal Engine | Inside Unreal” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0guOMTiwmhk) I was wondering if anyone can/has set up an Unreal to Blender and vice versa pipeline.

My skills in python are very basic and if anyone has pointers how to:
-transfer static and skeletal mesh from Blender to Unreal
-transfer basic material node setup from Blender to Unreal
-put static/skeletal meshes in Unreal from Content Browser to current level
-copy selected objects transforms from blender scene to unreal current level with actors and vice versa

I’m very interested in how to do what Aaron Carlisle showed at the 47:17 time mark in the livestream with maya and unreal with his “unreal_to_maya_serialization_demo” and do that for Blender and Unreal.

It is probably possible. The easy way is to write an addon in Blender that writes stuff like material nodes to a text file or something, then in UE4 parse that and create nodes from it. You could also do it with object locations or anything really. Probably a good idea too since the UE4 scene importer is really broken.

The harder way is to read .blend files directly and get the info from there. blendfile.py · rBAM or blender-file · PyPI could be helpful.

You could also look into using the unofficial UnrealEnginePython plugin which has a lot more tutorials, examples and documentation than the UE4 experimental plugin. It’s also usable in runtime.
UnrealEnginePython/YourFirstAutomatedPipeline.md at master · 20tab/UnrealEnginePython · GitHub here’s an example of the UE4 side of importing meshes and creating materials at least.

This is probably very doable. The problem is that anything interacting with Blender’s API needs to be GPL. So directly querying the scene or managing data via API calls Live Link style is probably going to run into licensing issues.

As cyaoeu suggested export to an intermediate file or directly reading blend files may be an option.

To be honest this is something I wish Epic would do themselves, not just for Blender too but any other DCCs too. Importing shader trees or scene stuff (levels) doesn’t sound like it would be too hard and having official support for that would be amazing.