- Export an FBX with correct scale and orientation and import it cleanly into Unreal.
- Assemble modular pieces snapped on a grid and walk the graybox at human scale.
Mon 2:00 · Brief A kit is a system, not a pile
One good wall panel is a model. Five pieces that snap together on a grid, in any order, without seams, is a kit — and a kit is what actually builds a level.
The grid is the contract
Modular work is grid discipline and very little else. Pick a module — a number you can halve and double comfortably — and every piece is built to it, snapped to it, and exported on it. The moment one piece is 3 cm off, the whole kit stops tiling and no amount of good modeling rescues it.
Origins matter more than geometry here. Two pieces with identical shapes and different origin placement behave completely differently when you drop them into a level. Set the origin to the same corner on every piece, deliberately.
The export contract
Blender thinks in meters and Unreal thinks in centimeters: one Blender meter must land as 100 Unreal units. Apply your transforms before export — unapplied scale and rotation is the root cause of a whole genre of downstream weirdness — and mind the up axis so your piece arrives standing rather than lying down.
Do not memorise a magic exporter checkbox; settings drift between versions. Memorise the check: import it, then measure it in Unreal. If it is 100× off, it is units. If it is on its face, it is the axis pair.
Photogrammetry and 3D Gaussian splatting turn captured reality into scene assets, and libraries like Quixel Megascans put scanned surfaces one click away. Yet hand-authored, budget-conscious geometry is still what ships in a playable build. Discussion: for your kit, when do you scan, when do you model, and when do you kitbash?
Mon 2:45 · Guided lab Unwrap, export, assemble
Take last week's pieces the rest of the way: from clean geometry to a walkable graybox in Unreal.
- Export FBX with correct scale and orientation
File → Export → FBX. Apply transforms first, set the scale so your piece reads at true size in Unreal (Unreal works in centimeters, so 1 Blender meter should land as 100 Unreal units), and mind the up-axis so your piece arrives standing correctly. Export only the selected kit objects. - Import into Unreal
Drag the FBX into the Content Browser under your project's
Content/. Check the import options: import uniform scale reads as expected, normals are sensible, and the Static Mesh appears at the right size next to a default cube in the viewport. If it's tiny or sideways, fix the export, don't hack the import scale. - Assemble on a grid
Drag Static Meshes into the level and enable grid snapping (the snap toolbar, with a grid size matching your module). Snap the kit together into a short corridor or room. Seams between pieces should be invisible.
- Walk it at scale
Drop a Player Start and press Play In Editor (PIE), or use a first-person/third-person template Character roughly 1.8m tall, and move through your graybox. Does the space feel right for a human? Scale mistakes that hide in the viewport become obvious the moment you stand inside them.
Wed 2:00 · Workbench Practice, unhurried
No new material. You work on your own file while I circulate — this is the hour where the technique from the guided lab stops being something you watched and becomes something you can do.
- Finish the lab on your own work
The guided lab was built on the class example. Now do it on the piece you are actually submitting. That second pass is where it sticks.
- If you fell behind, catch up here
This is what the hour is for. Say so and I will come to you — do not spend it quietly stuck.
- If you are ahead, go deeper
Take the optional extensions from the lab, or push the piece further than the brief asks. Nothing graded depends on them.
- Ask Gary, the AI TA, anything
The tutor on the course site is open all term for questions about how and why. It explains; you build. No agents in the work until Week 9.
- You walked the Editor Utility graph fully and can explain what each section does.
- The utility runs, reports plausible triangle counts, and roughly agrees with Blender's stats and Unreal's Statistics window.
- The Editor Utility asset is saved separately, in its own clearly named Content Browser folder.
Wed 3:10 · Crit / share Walk the graybox, launch Project 1
We take a short walk through each person's assembled graybox on the projector — checking scale, snapping, and whether the checker map reads consistently across pieces. Then we launch Project 1: the Game-Ready Asset Kit. The full brief, requirements, and rubric live on the course Projects tab at /fmx320/#projects — read it before you leave. Over the next few weeks your kit grows from graybox into a textured, budgeted, playable set, and your agent-built inspection utility becomes the tool you check your budget with.
Homework — due before Week 04
| Task | Deliverable |
|---|---|
| Unwrap the rest of your kit pieces and unify texel density with the checker map. | All pieces unwrapped, checker screenshot dropped in the class share. |
| Export and import the full kit, then assemble a small room or corridor graybox in Unreal. | An Unreal level with the snapped graybox, backed up. |
| Read the Project 1 brief and draft your kit's piece list and budget. | A short plan in your project folder referencing the brief on the Projects tab. |
Resources
- Blender UV editing docs — seams, unwrapping, and the UV Editor.
- Unreal mesh import docs — FBX scale, orientation, and import settings.
- Unreal Editor Utility & Blueprints docs — how the tool the agent built plugs into the editor.