Blender to Unreal Pipeline Tools

This add-on was created to facilitate tools for

• Easy creation of and assignment of collision geometry to static meshes
• Custom baking and exporting frame range, different to scene frame range
• Baking of camera focus distance data
• Baking of camera animation, including driver based data (e.g. “Camera Shakify” add-on data)
• Baking of armature animations, including driver based data or custom animation (e.g. “Wiggle Bones” add-on data)
• Export of camera animation with consistend axis alignment to other exports
• Export of armature animation with consistend axis alignement to other exports and “root” as top hierarchy name, no matter the armature name
• Export of skeletal meshes (entire collection) with “root” as top hierarchy name, no matter the armature name (e.g. Armature.001 ..002. etc.)
• Export of static meshes (batch export of selected objects or entire collection)

Baked objects are safed as independet local objects in export collections so that the original animation data is not affected. The workflow is optimized for dealing with linked and overridden data (Library Override), where often you end up with armatures being renamed with .001 or .002 suffixes when you link the same armature multiple times into your scene. I built-in an option which always renames the armature to “root” for export, so you don’t have to worry about namig conventions in your Blender scenes (which would lead to import errors in Unreal Engine).

Typical hurdles that arise during export from Blender, like specific FBX export settings, missing camera depth-of-field data, scaling and armature root bone namings, can be handled automatically.

The main purpose of writing this add-on was to make the creation of cinematics in Unreal Engine easier while doing all the armature and camera animation in Blender. It has not been used in a game pipeline so far, but a lot of functions could work just as well for this purpose.

Limitations

Blenders default FBX exporter has some serious limitations for FBX export. The root bone of Armatures will have a scale of 100 in Unreal Engine, which can cause problems when parenting stuff to bones or sockets of the skeletal mesh (the children then have to be scaled to 0.01), or when transferring collision geometry from static meshes to the skeletal mesh (resulting to be 100 x too small :/ ). In a lot of cases these limitations are not that important for creating cinematics or cutscenes, but I want to be transparent about these issues. If there's enough interest and support, I'll look into better export options to fix these issues.

Add-on version compatibility

Blender:
This add-on has been tested with Blender versions 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3. It might work with other versions, but they have not been tested yet.

Unreal Engine:
At the time of publication, exports have been tested with Unreal Engine versions 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5. It might work with earlier versions though.

License and pricing

In alginment Blenders GNU license model, this add-on is free for you to download and use to your hearts content. If you feel that the add-on has added value to your creative endeavors I would be happy to receive a donation. Simply “purchase” it again and enter a price you feel the tool is worth to you. I will be forever greatful, no matter how big or small the amount, and this helps me to further develop this tool.

In the same spirit, do not re-use my code for the purpose of selling parts or the entirety of it.

Add-on documentation

Check out the documentation page if you are still on the edge to decide to download.