If you use Blender to make game assets/characters

[Munsa]

I have to comment one thing: I understand the concrete workflow between Blender and Unreal is very specific (or Blender any other engine), but looking the theme from a more general perspective:

Doing assets/characters on Blender is great, IF YOU ONLY USE THEM ON BLENDER. If one does Blender assets/characters with the intention of sell/use them for games (and I think a lot of students have that goal), those students need to know how to do them “game ready”, be Unreal, Unity, Godot or any game-engine. They need to know what can they export and what no, what needs to be done in the game-engine and what can be done in Blender, what problems can appear when you export an asset that the game-engine will not be able to import in its totality…

The list is long: Do you know you will need to remake the materials (except for the most simple ones) on the engine? Do you know what Modifiers can be exported? Or what constraints? What kind of bones are good to export, what will be ignored or what bones will simply destroy your hierarchy if you try to import to a game-engine? Or how to do an UV mapping so you don’t have lighting problems? …

There is almost no information on Google on how to do so (especially for Characters) or it is very dispersed, so I would like to put the idea on the table. I have spend hours and hours searching and learning how to do so, perhaps I have spend more time on it than learning Blender, and I would really have liked to be taught some intro on it. Be an extra section in the courses, an other course or an article on the web, I really think it is a theme that needs to be addressed. Thank you for your patience.

[FedPete]

I must say, in the past, GameDev was just game programming and a tool called Blender on this site. But Blender is now a popular part of the GameDev learning products.

I can see the gap between those two software packages. And yes there is less attention to the problems of Blender assets and importing them into a Game engine. GameDev is of course a commercial company. Looking for courses that apply to a lot of people, instead of very specific problem-solving package integration courses.
GameDev has many starter courses with funny, easy-to-do (for experienced people) subjects. And very few for the more complex features of Blender (VFX).

They probably think that the market value for a course you are looking for is probably low. Too few students and a high investment in the course itself. It’s hard to keep courses up-to-date with the speed of Blender growing in features and changes. The same for game engines.

[Munsa]

Thank you for your answer.

I understand that perhaps the marked value for the course may be low (my intuition says no, but that’s no an objective marked value ). I was talking about a generic GameEngine - Blender pipeline, not an Unreal -Blender one, so it would be not a very specific problem-solving, and it wouldn’t need to be a so high investment course, because the problems are the same in any Blender/GameEngine version you use. Things like you have to do the materials in the game engine and you can’t export them from Blender, but if you bake your textures like that you can export them to do your materials (look at the type of normal map your game engine needs, and you can bake it like this in Blender, for example), or you need a skeleton without control rigs to export… Generic things. Perhaps it doesn’t need a specific course, but some chapter/extra content on the Blender ones.

I see those questions in Discord: about how to export/import materials from Blender to Unity or Unreal, for example (it is a very common doubt).

This is only my opinion, but I really think it would be a very good addition, even if it is only a simple extra chapter so the people knows that you can’t export “all” from blender to an engine.

[NP5]

Yes it gets asked once or twice a year. I think the telling thing is how it is not done online on YouTube or such like. I suspect it is a minefield. With two, or more, softwares potentially changing.

If it was a good opportunity, someone would be doing it already!

I personally think it is grossly overestimated how many want, or actually end up taking Blender things into games. There is a big chunk that are content to have made an Orc dance via Mixamo, and that is as far as they care to go.

Blender even used to have it’s own internal Game Engine, but removed it!

As I understand it Godot is much closer linked to Blender and is very good.

[Munsa]

I agree that can be a minefield, but perhaps not so much for the reason of changing softwares (what can and can’t be exported doesn’t seem to change between versions, and even Unreal 5.1 uses an old version of .fbx) but from more of a point of view of who use those softwares. Artists normally don’t think about how it will work (or how it will be seen) in a game engine, and game engine “users” don’t care about anything that isn’t it looks good and it has a good performance on the game.

There are courses that do both (blender and Unreal), but I have found they view the process from one of the two “views”, artist or game-developer, and in their courses there are always “ignored” things, or even “erroneos” ones, that can give you problems later on (I have had to remake some assets for this, and it is no fun at all…). They are not bad courses, they are normally good, very good, but only on Blender or on Unreal, not both. So, yes, I understand it is a minefield.

Now it seems that Unreal is beginning to integrate “modelling” tools, for now basic ones, but they are doing it. Will see how it goes.

Thank you for your answers.