17 May Open-sourcing Our Blender Exporter and Rig Assistant

When Blender 2.8 released, we saw it as an opportunity to improve our workflow for game development. In the years since then, we developed several internal tools to integrate Blender into our game development process. 

As Paladin closed down on May 1st 2024, we would now like to share our tools fully open-source with the community.

Blender Exporter

The first thing we needed was a straightforward Blender to Unity exporter. To keep things simple, we wanted a single button to export our Blender 3D models and animations to Unity, without fussing over complicated selections or navigating menus. 

We present the Blender Exporter, a simple but powerful tool that exports Blender 3D models to Unity or Unreal, and that can be adapted to a game engine of your choice.

You can download and/or contribute to the project here: https://github.com/PaladinStudiosBVs/Blender-Exporter

Blender Exporter Features

• Add collections to be exported to a relative (if you are working with a team) or absolute path.
• Presets for Unity and Unreal for both 3D models and animations. 
• The exporter can easily be extended to other game engines
• Create paths per collection or per set
• Zero out objects before export
• Group all objects in the container and export them all in one go

Rig Assistant

The next step was rigging. We like to create clean rigs where the control rig is separate from the deform rig and we don’t want to deal with world vs local space. This requires extra steps in the rigging process. To make this workflow viable in blender, we created a rig tool that helps setup rigs with these parameters and cut down a lot of mode switching. It’s a collection of tools that greatly improve speed.

We present the Rig Assistant:

You can download and/or contribute to the project here: https://github.com/PaladinStudiosBVs/Blender-RigAssistant

Rig Assistant Features

• Tools to create Deform Bones
• Setting up bones with constraints
• Adding control bones and shapes

If you want to learn more about this addon and how to use it, please read this document, which includes examples and best practices:
https://github.com/PaladinStudiosBVs/Blender-RigAssistant/wiki

We hope that making these tools open source will benefit the Blender, Unity, Unreal and broader game development communities. 

Thank you!
-Team Paladin