Upcoming "Send to Unreal" add-on for Blender Feedback

Hey, it’s author of Mr Mannequins Tools! https://forums.unrealengine.com/comm…rials/1661319/

For me personally there’s a few (almost) essential settings in order to be able to stop supporting my Mr Mannequin compatibility export and use only a “Send To Unreal” button. These are settings i would require for a pipeline regardless of my add-on.

  1. Dynamic scaling for any unit scale (even just as an option). Using a scale of 0.01 while accurate to UE4 makes for a bunch of incompatibilities with animation and physics within Blender, things like cloth simulation can sometimes become almost impossible below a scale of 1.0. I already support this in Mr Mannequins Tools for exporting animation, meshes and armatures, the math for it is pretty straight forward: object scale on x y and z * (100 * bpy.context.scene.unit_settings.scale_length) while doing this can sometimes lead to very tiny errors it makes no noticeable difference although doing it to animations does require iterating through and scaling keyframed locations through the fcurves prior to firing the export and after scaling the armature.

  2. “Use Only Deform Bones” FBX export option. This is not about exporting only bones with weight it’s a simple and easy way of excluding bones that are not needed within the engine such as pole targets, IK targets and various other bones used for more intricate animation techniques in Blender.

  3. “Export Only Selected” option is also a must for anyone that wants to have control over what’s being exported. Especially in scenes with many objects.

  4. All the FBX export options relating to animation! They all have uses although some of them are niche, many people do not like messing around with the NLA editor (especially beginners) so being able to ignore the NLA stack and simply export the active animation as it is would be some great functionality.

To be quite honest it would probably be for the best to expose all the FBX export settings and simply keep your preferred defaults as many more advanced users will be needing access to them.

Thanks for the amazing stream and i can’t wait to see more! If you guys really can fix the bone orientation both to and from Unreal Engine it would mean a lot less time on coding and support for me and i would be able to really focus on making advanced rigging techniques easy to use, as well as continuing the work i’ve started in the coming update 1.3 which covers retargeting animation within Blender and modular DIY rigging.

I cannot wait for the source code to be available i will help out as much as i possibly can!

Edit: I (and many others) would love to see sockets both exported and imported to and from unreal engine with Blender :wink: