Blender to Substance Designer to UE4: My Workflow

I like to think my workflow is unique. I use a free 3D modeling program, an engine that comes with a very affordable subscription plan, and a fairly expensive model texturing program (at least relative to my other tools). No Photoshop and no Autodesk products are involved. This is in part because the FBX exporter in Blender doesn't carry over the textures that you use in the Blender material editor to UE4 , and also partly because Substance Designer is a tremendous time saver.

(UPDATE: It seems that the materials in Blender can, in fact, be exported to UE4 now. I only exported a mesh with basic colors [by accident], so I can't attest to what extent Blender's material editor settings will carry over to UE4)

Here is the workflow I currently use to create meshes, texture them, and import them into UE4.

Creating Custom Collision for Unreal Engine 4 in Blender

After you have gone through the steps of readying your mesh to export into Unreal, you may want to consider adding your own collision to your model. Collision, put simply, is what tells your game what parts of your mesh objects can and can't pass through. UE4's collision tools are great, they have even updated the collision creation tool to work with more complex geometry to allow objects to pass through holes in the mesh, but if you want more control over how your collision works, it can be easily done in Blender.

Here are the steps to create custom collision in Blender for use in UE4.

Texture Mapping Tools

Normal and specular maps generated using Substance Designer 4

At some point in game development, you are likely going to need to do some texture mapping for your game materials. I'm not going to use this post to explain what textures and materials are, but if you don't know, check out this Wikipedia article about texture mapping and this page from Epic Games that discusses materials and textures. Here is a list of some popular free and paid software you can use to help you create materials for your game assets.

UDK Landscapes Part 3: Using Weightmaps to Apply Your Landscape Materials

This is the third and final installment of the UDK Landscape trilogy. In the first two parts of this series, we created our height and weight maps using Terresculptor and then imported those maps into UDK. In this post we will show you how to apply materials to your landscape to make it look nice and pretty.

This one is relatively complicated if you aren't familiar with UDK's Material Editor, so I've made the instructions as detailed as possible.

UDK Landscapes Part 2: Importing Heightmaps and Weightmaps into UDK

You can either create your game landscape inside UDK using the landscape editor or by using an external program and importing those heightmaps into UDK. In our last post I detailed how to use one such external program called Terresculptor to generate height and weight maps for your landscape. This tutorial will show you how to import those maps into UDK.

UDK Landscapes Part 1: How to Create a Heightmaps and Weight Maps in Terresculptor

If you want to create a landscape for your game, you no longer have to painstakingly sculpt it by hand using UDK tools or a sculpting application. By using a program called Terresculptor, you can generate heightmaps and weight maps to import into UDK to save yourself a considerable amount of time. This tool is especially helpful for huge, sprawling landscapes. This tutorial will show you how to generate heightmaps and weight maps in Terresculptor, and how to import those maps into UDK.

2014 Update and Substance Designer

Substance Designer graph and 2D output windows of a rusted metal wall substance

Substance Designer

After a brief hiatus for the holidays, I have returned to work on our game in the new year with a brand new tool: Substance Designer 4. While this is a bit of a pricey detour from our general “spend no money” policy, I caught a Steam flash sale and couldn't resist the temptation to buy a commercial software license for 66% off the retail price.

If you haven’t heard of Substance Designer, it’s an extremely powerful node-based texturing tool made by Allegorithmic. You can string together nodes to make your substance (e.g., a rusted metal with chipping paint) once, and then save that substance for later use on your other models by simply dragging and dropping the pre-made substance into your new node graph (it will condense the whole pre-made graph into a single node, which saves space) and hooking up the nodes. The 3D view shows you how your model looks in real-time, so it saves time you would otherwise spend hopping back and forth from Photoshop. (I don’t mean for this to sound like an ad for the software, I’m just really excited about this purchase).

Substance Designer is directly supported by UDK, so a major advantage for me is that I don’t have to worry about issues with UV mapping and trying to get my Blender materials to display correctly in UDK. Further, you can “expose” attributes in Substance Designer to allow you to edit how your materials look inside of UDK (e.g., expose the color palette and you can edit the color of your material in UDK), which gives your level designer more power over how assets look inside the game.

The downside is that I am now obligated to learn yet another complex tool. Fortunately, Allegorithmic has released several tutorials for using Substance Designer, so that should take some of the pain out of the learning process.