Book Image

3D Game Design with Unreal Engine 4 and Blender

By : Jessica Plowman
Book Image

3D Game Design with Unreal Engine 4 and Blender

By: Jessica Plowman

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 now has support for Blender, which was not available in earlier versions. This has opened up new possibilities and that is where this book comes in. This is the first book in the market combining these two powerful game and graphic engines. Readers will build an amazing high-level game environment with UE4 and will show them how to use the power of Blender 3D to create stunning animations and 3D effects for their game. This book will start with creating levels, 3D assets for the game, game progression, light and environment control, animation, and so on. Then it will teach readers to add amazing visual effects to their game by applying rendering, lighting, rigging, and compositing techniques in Blender. Finally, readers will learn how to smoothly transfer blender files to UE4 and animate the game assets. Each chapter will add complexities to the game environment.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
3D Game Design with Unreal Engine 4 and Blender
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Customizing your settings


Without customizing some of your settings, working with Blender can be a bit of a chore, especially if you have any experience with another 3D software. When we started moving around the interface a bit, you may have noticed right away that if you left-click, it moves the little bullseye cursor. This is called the 3D cursor and it is actually used for a lot of things within Blender, such as where to place new 3D shapes. Now, moving this when you left-click is less than ideal and is sometimes easily forgotten as you attempt to select things in your 3D scene, but there is a way to change that.

In the top-left corner of the screen, click on File and select User Preferences. Select the Input tab and look down along the left-hand side until you see the Select With option. You can see that it's currently set to right-click to select objects. Let's change that to Left to bring it more in line with Unreal Engine 4. It stops a lot of confusion later when you are going between the two programs. Be sure to click on the Save User Settings button at the bottom left corner once you have made this change. The second setting that needs to be changed involves scale.

The following screenshot shows the Blender User Preferences window:

Setting the mouse selection to use the LMB

To change this next setting, we are going to take a look at the Properties pane. The window looks something like this:

Along the top of the pane are several small tabs. We are looking for the Scene tab denoted by this icon:

Setting the mouse selection to use the LMB

This pane allows us to change several options pertaining to the scene, such as the scale. Unreal Engine 4 uses centimeters as its default measurement, so we want to match that here. This will make our game assets fit into our levels without the need to scale them in the game engine. Follow these steps:

  1. Change the units used from None to Metric.

  2. Change the scale to 0.01.

  3. Objects already in the scene (such as our cube) will not scale. If there is anything you would like to keep, scale it by 100. This can be done by clicking on the Scale button on the left hand side, typing 100, and pressing Enter.

  4. This will cause the object to start clipping through the edge of the grid. To fix this, we press N to open the Scene Properties bar, find the View section, then the Clip section, and lastly, change the End property to 1km.

Tip

Hint: Certain objects dropped in through the Add menu will not be scaled appropriately. Scaling these objects by 100 will fix the issue.

Now that we have made those changes, save your file by using the File menu or pressing Ctrl + S.