Learning how to create simple models with Blender that you can actually use for game development might seem impossible to a lot of people, especially to programmers who don’t feel like they are artistically inclined. However, after +50h of practice, I found myself having the confidence to create simple game assets myself. Here is how I got started.

I stumbled upon a couple of very interesting Blender tutorials by Grant Abbitt on Youtube. He teaches very simple techniques for absolute beginners and his videos feel more or less like a mixture between painting tutorials a la Bob Ross and Lego instructions. These Beginner Exercises are very easy to follow but often ask you to try things out for yourself first before continuing with detailed commentary.

Grant Abbitt’s first tutorials are pretty simple to follow and introduce the fundamentals of Blender. You start off with a simple dinner scene and end up with a taste of what your game assets could look like.

After finishing the first four beginner exercises, I started to look into creating an actually usable asset. This is when I jumped to the Low Poly Well Tutorial. This tutorial consists of three parts and yielded a very decent result. I especially liked how this tutorial challenged you to create some of the easier stuff yourself. This gets you into the right mindset by forcing you to think and plan ahead when modeling.

The well tutorial teaches you how to add different colors, bumps, and dents to your mesh in order to combat uniformity and to create a visually interesting result with a bit of character.

After finishing the well tutorial, I wanted to move on to something bigger – something that I could export to Unreal Engine, something I could animate and show off. I wanted to create a product that people would like and enjoy. The ideal guide to support that goal was the Sea Shack Tutorial. The tutorial consists of twelve parts but the actual geometry was modelled in the first six. The construction of the shack is briefly explained but you are left on your own after modeling the lower platform. The creation of twelve easy objects in the scene is skipped too. However, the shack and the other minor models should be pretty easy to recreate with the previous tutorials in mind.

The final result in Blender. I added a camera path with a little dip in the back to get the most out of the scene. There are some screen space reflection artifacts remaining that I was not able to fix.

Getting Your Assets Game Ready

In order to make the assets available in Unreal Editor I had to export the scene as an FBX file that can be easily imported. Joining all elements of the scene together enables you to easily transfer the whole scene layout as a single static mesh to Unreal Editor. Make sure to name all the materials you are using because those names are used to create material assets in Unreal Editor during import. Most material assets need at least a little tuning when it comes to shininess. Cloth materials require back-face culling to be deactivated as both sides of the mesh need to be rendered. The recreation of the water material needs most of your attention though.

The most complicated material to recreate in Unreal Editor is the water material. Make sure to set the render mode to Translucent and activate the checkbox next to Screen Space Reflections.
During the modeling process in Blender, some normals might have been flipped. Objects with flipped normals will not be rendered correctly due to back-face culling. You can check your normals by activating Face Orientation. Blue faces are rotated towards the camera and are fine while red faces are not. This can be fixed by pressing Alt + N -> Flip in Modeling mode.

After the initial import of the scene with all components joined together I removed the fish meshes from the Blender scene and exported a single fish mesh separately. I wrapped the fish mesh in a fish actor that is animated via Blueprints. The fish actor was then placed, scaled and rotated multiple times to replace all previously existing meshes. You need to do this for every additional element like the seaweed or the flag that you want to see animated.

The animation blueprint for fish moves and rotates the mesh slightly back and forth. The random time offset is helpful to prevent a uniform animation look.
I presented the final result from Unreal Engine on reddit to figure out the market appeal and received over 600 upvotes. The negative comments focused on the chosen coloration.

While I’m personally really happy with the result I do think that the scene and I might benefit from additional optimization:

  • This little animation currently requires 30 single color materials. This number could be vastly reduced by mapping a texture onto the mesh.
  • The walls of the shack consist of multiple individual boards. The number of vertices could be reduced by using a single simplified mesh and a normal map.
  • Bones and Rigging could be utilized to improve the fish animation.

Hope that helps.