A few days ago, the UE4 guys made an stream wich talked about UE4 and blender, and the whole animation and FBX workflow for import/export. This could be useful to some, so i link here the VOD.
I’ll definitely have a look at this when I get home! (speaker volume too low at work)
Excellent!:yes:
That’s cool, yeah, neat and all…
But if only Blender’s animation tools weren’t a headache to use -_-
May i ask you why you think that?, ive learned and used all mayor 3d software and i think blender is perfectly fine unless you are a studio that doesnt care about the cost of maya or 3dsmax. Or if you need those fancy plugins.
Part 2:
Neat… gonna have to watch it later.
Eh, there are a lot of rig setups that are simply impossible with Blender and will remain that way until the depsgraph is fixed up. Unlikely that you’ll encounter these issues for a simple-ish game rig, but there are definitely problems with Blender’s rig tools.
That’s exactly what the guy in the video said. He pointed out that there were issues with Blender’s animation tools compared to Maya and while he didn’t go into a lot of detail about the issues, the main gist is that constraints in Blender is overly complicated in Blender and even then is not as robust. i agree with him. Constraints in Maya and even Max is light-years ahead just in-terms of ease of use.
For “simple-ish” game rigs, the constraints aren’t a big problem. It can be fiddly to setup a few of the usual tricks riggers take for granted in other applications like Maya & 3DS, but all in all, game rigs are not going to be super complex by dint of the fact game character animations are generally not that complex.
The biggest issue facing UE4 is the FBX import/export compatibility with Blender. That demonstration shows that you can get armatures in there, but even though the import/export was a simple round trip (i.e. import FBX into Blender, export out of Blender without editing) - the output was altered enough UE4 couldn’t recognise them as the same character. This is problematic when trying to import multiple animations from FBX to layer onto the same character in the UE4 engine.
Cool he even does a shout out to XRG81, which is one of my favs youtube video tutorials on handpainted textures and low poly modeling for games with blender. He and that dude PigArt.
It’s also really cool to see Epic as one of the donors that gives large lump sums now and then.