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.

Part 2) _a.3d & _d.3d

Unreals vertex mesh format requirs two different files to work as an animated mesh. The _a.3d stores the vertex animation timeline and the _d.3d is the mesh data. It is not important to name your .3d files in the suggested way you can rename them to NewMesh_Animation.3d and NewMesh_Data.3d but I will explain where I prepare the .uc file for importing the mesh.

Skywolf wrote an exporter for Blender which allows you to export your mesh to the right formats!

Skywolfs Blender Vertex Mesh Exporter Plugin

I'm using Blender 2.8 in this tutorial. In this version of Blender the plugin works flawless for me and I don't know if there will be updates to the plugin for later Blender versions.