Question regarding blender courses in regards to Unity

[Cardician]

I’ve purchased most of GameDev.Tv’s courses and I’m enjoying them. You guys do great work and overall I’m quite satisfied. I recently got the 3 Blender courses because I wanted to learn about Blender and how to import things I model into Unity. Perhaps I didn’t read closely enough, but I was under the impression and it sort of seemed implied that the three courses would all cover at some point importing things into Unity. Environments for you environment course, random object models for the Complete Blender course, and character models for the Character course. However, having gone through what’s covered in the first two, it doesn’t seem like this is even touched upon at any point. I see there are a few discussions regarding this for character models in the character course but what about the others? Am I just missing it? Do the discussions in the character course completely cover the knowledge needed to do this for all types of models?

Wouldn’t a couple of quick discussions on how to properly import models into Unity or Unreal go a long way into making these courses more useful? I mean it’s great and I’ve learned a lot about Blender, but so what? How am I supposed to get these things into Unity with their textures and materials and everything? I do know from playing around with it a bit that it’s not super simple and obvious so I’m just amazed that you guys don’t touch on this stuff. Especially considering how great your overall courses are. Is it in one of the other courses? Because I purchased and have looked through the complete 2d and 3d courses and don’t see anything about how to import models or textures or UV mapping or anything in that realm.

Thanks.

[PublicGhoul]

I agree. We need more information on how to import things into Unity/Unreal. I started learning how to use Blender specifically for making game assets, but I have no idea how to get my creations AND their textures/materials into a game engine properly. I spent a couple days googling how to do this and didn’t really get anywhere

[Capricas_Kirito]

Michael covers exporting your models for use in other programs in the Low-poly Chess Board and Pieces 2.7x section of Complete Blender Creator (currently video 148 Exporting your Chess Model). He also mentions it briefly in Section 2 of Blender Environmental Artist as well as in the Game Assets 2.7x Section of Complete Blender Creator.

[Cardician]

Yeah, guess I need to be more specific. I don’t just mean straight importing. That’s not a huge deal, hence I guess why they cover it and do so very briefly. I mean everything going along with importing models. Like PublicGhoul mentioned. UV Unwrapping, texture maps, and all that other stuff. Things I don’t even know the name of because I don’t know anything about it or how to do it. But if you’re actually going to model something and import it into a game engine, you have to know these things unless you’re just going to import a grey model. Or am I wrong? If so, that’d be good to learn too. Hence the whole point of this topic. Why is this stuff not covered?

GameDev.tv…the name sort of implies content related to game development. 3d modelling is a huge part of that, and great, they have some good course material on it. However, they only touch on the aspects of it related to game dev. Doesn’t really seem sensible since the whole focus of this place is game development. So they should also cover all the more advanced topics of actually getting models into a game engine. Again, I know they do touch on it, but I also know there is a lot more info needed to actually do this properly.

Anyway, as I said, I am happy with everything I’ve learned and they’re good courses. I’m just disappointed that there is this huge gap of info that isn’t covered. And I’ve looked closely through all three blender courses now, and even in the one on characters, they don’t really get into some of these more advanced topics. So I now have to go elsewhere and try to find material that covers this huge part of game dev when I’d like to just keep learning from these guys who do a great job with their courses. Oh well.

[BunjaminDanklin]

I think importing things into Unity or Unreal Engine is likely a matter for courses specifically on those pieces of software. Were I following a course on Blender and the instructor tangents onto talking about importing assets into an engine that I am not intending on using; I would likely feel alienated.

Anyway i’ll see if I can answer a couple of these questions. So long as you don’t disable it when you define your export settings; UV maps are ‘saved into the object data’ and so when you export a mesh as a .fbx, the UV maps just go along with it. Rigs and animation sequences are also saved into an objects data like UV maps. Texture maps need to be saved as images so that they can be set up as materials in whichever engine you intend to take them across to.

There are nuances when importing models into specific engines for specific reasons; so as I said above those questions are best answered in the context of the engine itself as opposed to in the context of Blender exporting. Good luck on your game development journey!

[Capricas_Kirito]

I see where you’re coming from Cardician, but like Bunjamin said, importing assets rightfully should be covered by the course teaching the targeted software. Personally, I’ve decided to use Unreal for my game development. Am I going to the Unity courses to find out how to import something into Unreal? No, I’m gonna look for it in the Unreal Courses. So why then would I look in the Blender courses for something I already expect to be in an Unreal Course?

Indeed, Blender is about creating assets that can be used in many different ways, so I would expect to learn about exporting my models in the Complete Blender Creator (the name does imply I’ll learn all the basics about using Blender). Perhaps we can ask @Michael_Bridges to do a more comprehensive video about the export settings for v2.8 when he gets to that point of the course. But, while there are likely many similarities between the various game engines when it comes to importing assets, the more advanced stuff is going to be engine specific. Therefore, we need to bug @ben, or whichever instructor is covering our chosen game engine, to cover the complexities of doing the imports.

As far as UV unwrapping, UV Maps, Normal Maps, Height Maps, and Secular/Mask Maps go, Michael, covers those from the Blender side in the Game Assets 2.7x Section (I expect he’ll cover them in the same general spot for the 2.8 content). Texture, or Diffuse Maps, are covered throughout the 2 Blender Courses I’ve taken, and I imagine in the other one as well; and my experience with getting stuff out of Blender and into a game engine suggests that everything except the actual maps transfers as part of the .fbx file.

[Michael_Bridges]

We tried to do this in the past and unfortunately ran into issues in the past where If I try and cover every engine we get a tonne of complaints about irrelevant content, which makes sense. We used to have a specific Blender to Unity course, but it oddly just wasn’t in demand, so we didn’t update it or replace it.

Setting up the assets themselves in each specific engine is unfortunately out of the scope of any course that isn’t engine specific. and would be hours of content which has nothing to do with Blender.

Whilst at a high level ALL the engines follow the same process, but the details vary wildly. Take Material setup in Unity- Drag and drop, Unreal, open the material node setup, Lumberyard much more convoluted the last time I twas using it!

That being said if there is enough interest in the subject it is certainly something that I could look at doing later in the year

[twisted]

we get a tonne of complaints about irrelevant content

yep, I would be one of those

[Michael_Bridges]

I don’t blame you at all. It is quite a challenge to try and cover all bases, and unfortunately we don’t currently have a platform that would generate a particular curriculum incorporating a specific learning journey!

[Cardician]

@Twisted, I’m sorry, but people complaining about too much content are just being ridiculous. Just don’t watch that video? How is it a problem to have too much content? The course has tons of great info in it and if it has even more info addressing various game engines, that’s a problem? That’s definitely one of the silliest things I’ve heard someone complain about. “Oh no, you’re giving me too much information and content for my money, I’m upset”…that’s ridiculous.

Anyway, regarding realistic concerns, I understand why it might be tough and it makes sense that there are differences between the different game engines and that the content is really geared more to specific game engines. I guess I was just hoping to learn these areas and it’s something I’m going to have to look elsewhere for.

Perhaps then, since you have specific courses geared towards specific game engines, content could be added to them that addresses some of this? It just seems like a silly thing to leave out. And topics like UV Mapping, texturing and all that, are they really game engine dependent? Is not figuring out how to create normal maps and UV maps and all that really specific towards Blender. But then again, perhaps all that stuff is covered and I just didn’t really realize it from the titles. I haven’t watched all the content of all three courses yet.

Anyway, I appreciate the feedback and Michael you’re a great teacher and I’m enjoying and learning a lot from your Blender courses, don’t get me wrong. I was just truly hoping to learn all I would need to get all my models into Unity and am a bit disappointed and also thought perhaps I just wasn’t seeing where the content was. But still, the courses are great and well worth the money so thank you for creating them.

[twisted]

@Cardician

Firstly it depends on how game engine specific content were presented. If it were in a clearly delineated section with all other content entirely independent of it, things wouldn’t be confusing. As a blender newbie, there are enough blender specific ideas to get to grips with, without having struggle through stuff it later transpires I’m not going to need.

Secondly, my interests are in the minetest engine and three.js. Would it be ok if the teacher spent time on developing lessons for blender+three or blender+minetest at the expense of exclusively blender topics?

I do love a debate

[Mario_Dupuis]

UV Maps will all work the same regardless of engine. Normals might have to be inverted for Unreal. I think Blender and Unity share the same normals orientations, for Unreal you can invert the green channel before exporting on your normal maps. Now that being said, most of the time you will have to recreate your materials in each engine since Blender material language do not translate well into Unreal material node editor or Unity material editor, although in Unity you can actually set it up so it can import the materials pretty close to what you set in blender if using blender render materials.
It is said that Blender 2.8 Eevee shader editor might be compatible with most engines. Now the trickiest part is always the rigging part. Different engines will use different approaches to how the rig will react, mostly based on the bones naming conventions and also the bone orientation when you export your models with rigs and animations.
Like Michael said, it would require way too much content for any single course about modeling. And having more content can be nice, but if you want to keep people engaged you better focus on one subject at a time. Long courses tend to discourage people, and to get the certificate at the end, you can’t skip much of the content.
There is already very thorough and in deep courses for the different engines, and importing assets is covered. Them being separated from modeling courses makes complete sense. But one can always ask the teachers on how to do specific things like exports settings used in blender that are particular to each engine (one free tip here, I think you can get rid of the smoothing group error in Unreal by exporting your smoothing as faces only in the FBX exporter from blender).

Also think about the other fact that each course gets updated some time later to the newest versions of the softwares we need to use. That requires a lot of time to do. These guys will always make sure their content will stay relevant for years to come.