Export your mesh from Blender

- We need to move our mesh from Blender to view in the Quixel program. We'll need to make sure that our mesh is exported with a few settings in place. But the process doesn't take long. So let's get started. Here's my model in Blender. A few things that we need to do with it just before we do the exporting process is to make sure that it's centered. And the easiest way to do that is, we'll hit "b," select everything in your scene, and just go to the centering process which is "n" and up here at the top.

I need to expand mine a little bit. And we would center the location or type in zero in each of these areas. Now my objects are all centered on the same pivot point which is a good idea. If yours aren't, you can leave the objects in place such as the tools that are attached to the canon. That's fine, but make sure that the canon, the main object, is centered. Quixel will still open the object if it's not centered, but 3doo will be throwing that object all around as it tries to rotate around a center that might be pretty far away from the object.

I'm going to hit "n" and close that now. Next thing that we need to do is select both objects. Now in this case I've already done that, but you would hit "b" and select both objects. You can see that there's a dark orange and a light orange outline around the objects at this point. And then we'll go to our exporter which is File, Export, and we're going to select OBJ. First thing that we're going to do is give our object a name.

I'm just going to name mine "Canon" and I'm going to leave an underscore there so it will save iterations as we go. Make sure that you save the destination drive by changing it up here on this level. And then we'll get into the settings. Now there are particular settings that Quixel needs. l'll show you the settings for Blender obviously here, but no matter what program you're using you make want to look up with settings Quixel needs. It does need some different settings then you might be used to.

The first one that we're going to check is Selected Only. And what that means is the objects that were selected, in our case our canon and the tools, are what we want to export. If you don't select that, you may export your whole scene which may not be what you want. I'm going to turn off animation for mine because there is no animation on it. We want to apply modifiers which will make sure that any modifiers we still have on our models are baked down to the model.

We want to check Write Normals which is right down here. And what that's going to do is make sure that the surfaces of our model looks similar to what we had in Blender. I'm going to turn off Include Edges. I'm going to check on Smoothing Groups. Make sure Bitflag Smooth Groups is off. Go down here a little bit farther. We clearly want to include UVs. We're going to turn off Write Materials.

We're going to turn on Triangulated Faces. We're going to turn off Objects as OBJ Groups. We're going to turn off Material Groups. And then we're going to make sure that Keep Vertex Order is turned on. Now in my case, I'm going to bump the scale up to five. For the most part you don't need to change the scale too much. But I know that the scale on this particular model is small because of the game engine that i was importing it into.

And I'm going to make it a little bit bigger and all that's going to do is make it so that it imports into 3doo. A little bit more cleanly so that we don't have to zoom in on it. Another thing that I'll mention, and this is specific to Blender, the way the Blender exports OBJ objects, little bit different in that it won't keep that naming. If you remember I think we named it "canon "and canon tools" or something. It's not going to keep that naming exactly. What it's going to do is call it something like "Cylinder 001" or "Box 001." That's part of the data that goes out with Blender Objects.

As far as I know, there isn't a good way to change that, but it's going to be okay. It will still name it something that we can tell what it is. It's just something to be aware of and is only something that happens in Blender. Okay, at this point we should be ready to go. So we're going to hit Export OBJ and it will export out. There we go. And once it's done it's going to pop back into our regular screen. Now at this point it's saved an OBJ Object to our folder and we're ready to go over to Quixel and import our maps and mesh.

Keep in mind that every 3D program whether it's Blender, Max, Maya, all have slightly different export interfaces for those OBJ Objects. If you're using a different program other than Blender to model your meshes, look up the preferred settings for the exports. Think of this export process as neatly packaging up your model to send it to Quixel. And if done correctly, your model will open and be ready to texture in the Quixel tool set. With that in mind let's head over to Photoshop and open the Quixel suite and have a look at our model