Importing vertex meshes into Unreal

Part 1) Intro

Unreal Engine 1 is one of the older engines which seems to be user unfriendly when it comes to importing new animated meshes into the game. In this tutorial I like to share my workflow how I prepare and export meshes from blender and get it into Unreal / Unreal Tournament.

I will use my new RocketCan Mesh which I made for Unreal Redux as example.

Part 2) File Formats _a.3d & _d.3d and Blender plugin

Unreals vertex mesh format requirs two different files for the import.

The _a.3d stores the vertex animation timeline and the _d.3d stores the mesh data like the UV Map and materials / poly flags.

Thankfully Skywolf wrote an exporter for Blender which allows exporting the meshes in the right formats!

Link to the thread + downloads: Skywolfs Blender Vertex Mesh Importer / Exporter Plugin

For this tutorial I will use Blender 2.80. The plugin for blender works flawless in this version I don't know if there will be future updates for the plugin for newer Blender versions.

Part 3) Preparing your mesh

I setup an simple armature system for the mesh which includes an "Open" and "Close" animation.

• Frame 1 is the default position or the "Still" position the mesh.

• Frame 3 is the "Open" postion

• Frame 5 the "Close" position.