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.

Thankfully Skywolf wrote an exporter for Blender which allows to export meshes to the right formats!

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

For this tutorial I'm using Blender 2.80. 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 newer Blender versions.

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

Unreals vertex mesh format requirs two different files for the imported and to work as an animated mesh.

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