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Behind the Scenes: Blender to Unreal Engine
🕑 Added 2023-04-17 16:51:50 +0000 UTC
It's time for another rework! And quite substantial at that. I was browsing through my design archives and came across one of my very early low poly dioramas - the water mill scene I did back in 2019 (screenshot down below).
At the time, it was all about simplicity, stylization and giving a guide on how to succeed quickly in Blender. But times change and your proficiency and expectations grow too. And since I received very positive feedback on my recent shot at Unreal Engine, I decided to take this early piece of low poly environment and bring it into realistic Unreal setting.
The layout was pretty much set, so why go through the whole process of looking at reference images and sketching the composition? Well, as the times change, so do I and my taste. Something, that inspired me in 2019 doesn't necessarily do the trick anymore. So I always take a fresh look and look for improvements I can make.
Visit the full Pinboard here
I gathered some material on water mills and decided to go a bit more sophisticated route this time. My original work was barely a wooden shack and although I wanted to keep it small and subtle, some more architectural elements were necessary to bring it to life.
I sketched up a new design, basically keeping the old layout, but focusing more on the building and different wooden elements. I liked the update, so I went into Blender and started thinking through the steps necessary to bring this to Unreal.
Thing is, I really like to reuse elements in my scenes as linked duplicates (i.e. instances) and you just can't expect this functionality to transfer with fbx export (unless you use some custom scripting probably).
So I started to build the scene using as few objects as possible, taking advantage of object mode transforms (so a little bit of distortion here and there). For example, I created one wooden beam and used the same object with different lengths to cover all the beam requirements.
I applied the same method to all of the objects with a goal of creating as few assets as possible. I then textured those one by one and with the scene ready, I have hidden all the linked instances and exported only unique assets. Additionally, I exported a very simple scaffolding object of a house shape so I have a layout template.
I brought it all to Unreal, imported the same Substance materials using Unreal Substance plug-in and basically rebuilt the whole scene with the original assets around that primitive template low poly house.
It was quite time-consuming and redundant process, but this allows me to extend the scene and use the assets as a modular building system inside Unreal. If I wanted to upgrade the building with more stories and rooms, it would be quite easy to do directly in Unreal.
You can watch the process video on Youtube
