The next set was the loft. This is where the majority of the game will take place.
As I pondered on how long it would take me to build the set, something that felt like a divine intervention occurred, and I came across a YouTube video that showed how to carry over scenes exactly how they look in Blender to UE5 using a feature called “Universal Scene Description.”. and I had also come across a creator that built blender scenes for Sims players, and I immediately felt a sense of clarity. Before I paid the £4 for the building, I tested out the method with a free set in an older project I had, and it worked perfectly, so I thought everything would be fine, but when I went to do the real thing, I encountered a HOST of issues.
Although everything looked fine in Blender once I carried it over to Unreal, the scene itself was technically there, but there were no textures. I looked high and low for a solution but no one seemed to have one 🙁
Now I eventually did figure out how to get the textures back after hunting around in the material nodes for Unreal and figured out it was because “UseBaseColorTexture” was turned off in the materials for each item. So I had to painstakingly go through and turn it on for EVERY SINGLE ITEM IN THE SCENE. which just felt like a waste of time for such a large scene so I explored other methods of importing the scene.
I was advised to try the plug in “better FBX exporter” by the CG supervisor of the company I work for, and he sent me the add-on and made a quick tutorial on how to use it. It did work… kind of.. like it’s definitely good to know, but for some reason, it imported the walls really strangely. A section of the roof was missing and the walls went see-through when you went into gameplay mode. I tried to just rebuild the walls but building in UE5 is honestly hell IMO so I tried one more thing. which was exporting the file as a GLB file and that worked perfectly!
I still had some work to do. I began by fixing the windows in the scene and making the material work like glass. I then started adding lights into the scene and building a city landscape outside for continuity and immersion.
And then of course, additional things like cutting holes in the walls were doors are supposed to go and setting up collisions for all the objects so the characters can’t just walk through the couch or walls. A tedious but necessary task.