Materials imported as Cycles

[Starkium]

If you import the materials as cycles, you can't pack textures into fbx when you export. It'd be great if you could provide an option to generate materials as blender native render materials.

If you have a solution to packing textures into fbx when using cycles I'd appreciate that too.

[JamesO2x]

I'm not the owner of this repo. And I'm not sure if you're still interested in an answer for this, but I'm guessing this comment in the code answers your question:

 bpy.context.scene.render.engine = 'CYCLES'# Idc if you don't like cycles

The addon uses Cycles, and the author apparently doesn't care if you like that or not.

For a temporary work around, you should be able to save the BLEND file with 2.79, then open it up in a later version like 2.93 or 3.0. From there you should be able to switch freely between EEVEE and Cycles render engine. There was a massive overhaul of how materials work in 2.80+ so I'm pretty sure this is a non-issue in any version later than 2.79.

Its an extra step, but if your goal is to get packed FBX export, this should work I think.

[Starkium]

I'm not the owner of this repo. And I'm not sure if you're still interested in an answer for this, but I'm guessing this comment in the code answers your question:

 bpy.context.scene.render.engine = 'CYCLES'# Idc if you don't like cycles

The addon uses Cycles, and the author apparently doesn't care if you like that or not.

For a temporary work around, you should be able to save the BLEND file with 2.79, then open it up in a later version like 2.93 or 3.0. From there you should be able to switch freely between EEVEE and Cycles render engine. There was a massive overhaul of how materials work in 2.80+ so I'm pretty sure this is a non-issue in any version later than 2.79.

Its an extra step, but if your goal is to get packed FBX export, this should work I think.

My goal is to see how they crafted their materials and special tricks. I've been extracting the content for OOT 3ds as reference for good techniques for build an oculus quest game since I'm under very similar rendering constraints. Also, it's a PITA to set up everything by hand after importing into unreal, so having textures and such properly packed into the imported mesh would be fantastic.

[JamesO2x]

I don't know much about Unreal specifically, but I know that with Unity and Godot, you should be able to export from Blender as FBX, then just drag/drop the FBX file and its texture files into the appropriate "assets" folder of your project. In Unity it works pretty much out of the box, with textures and materials sorting themselves out. With Godot, I found that it preferred that I drag and drop the FBX file into the Godot window, and not directly into the asset folder. Godot then handles the automatic importing.

Again, I can't say much for Unreal because I haven't used it. For Unity, it was always recommended to me to NOT pack the textures into the FBX, and instead use external textures. Not sure if Unreal is the same in this case.

Each game engine has a few different quirks and toggles that you have to specifically check in Blender, in order to get a smooth exporting workflow. Once you find those settings, you can also save those export settings as a "preset" so you don't have to do it a hundred times again.

You'll probably have to look elsewhere to find a good "Blender to Unreal export pipeline" solution. I just don't know enough about Unreal to help you there, sorry.

EDIT: My assumption here is that you are importing the Cmb files into Blender 2.79, saving as BLEND file, then opening in a later version of Blender such as 3.0.

The material system was massively overhauled, and it VERY different in 2.79. For example, 2.79 the "Blender Internal" and "Cycles" materials are not compatible at all. In 2.80+ they replaced "Blender Internal" with a new render engine called EEVEE, and its seamless to switch between EEVEE and Cycles, as most of the material nodes and settings are compatible between them.

If you're trying to Export to FBX directly from 2.79, its likely to not work as I describe above. The whole material system is just too different in this older version of Blender.