Quality of life improvements for game dev in blender 2.8.
So for the last 5 months ive been using blender exclusively for game assets (planetside arena among other things).
Here's my 3 top pet peeves.
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A simple fix, ship 2.8 with set presets for unreal/unity/other popular engines. New users shouldn't need to google why their FBXes are all screwed up or rotated.
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Bevel seams.
On applying a bevel on pre-existing UVed item the new beveled UV is split seemingly randomly across objects, creating a need to RE-UV things. Now in game creation its very common not to apply bevels before UVing since you want to keep it open for changes and amends. Having to RE-UV things for seemingly no reason is just a pain.
Smarter minds then me can probably figure this out (align to world normals/biggest surface?). But at least make the seams constant.
3.Weighted normal workflow. I still haven't been able to swap to the 2.8 version fully due to how poorly 2.8 deals with custom weighted normals. The functionality is there in 2.8 but its scattered in such a way that its becomes a hindrance. A standard workflow resembling the popular y.a.v.n.e addon to 2.79 would be incredibly useful for a work method that's almost standardized for modern games and hard surface modeling.
2 Comments
This is really three proposals bundled into one post. It would best if you would separate them into individual posts so they could be discussed and voted upon on their own. Also, be sure to search the site to make sure your idea hasn't already been proposed.
I agree that fbx export presets would be good but I don't think a single export option is enough. At least when I export fbx to ue4 with characters for example you need two presets. One for the base mesh and another for animations export. I don't know if unity does the same. So theoretically if you just add the exporter presets you may add a lot of clutter if you also add export presets for some other programs. An addon that comes with blender but by default is disabled might work better? So you can enable the presets for each platform you are planning to use but don't get a long list of options that clutter the interface.
That being said the presets ui could be improved a lot.If it had a dropdown list with foldered structure you could simply create main folder for each game engine (ue4, unity, cryengine, lumberyard, fallout etc..) and then have more options available for each when you navigate deeper into the list. Like the shift-a menu in nodes editor. That way you can have them all enabled by default (under one folder called game engines for example) without causing clutter while at the same time you can have lots of options plus the fbx exporter is improved as well!