Blender has become the go-to tool for a lot of freelance 3D artists, partly because of the price and partly because it has genuinely caught up with paid software in most areas. But moving assets from Blender into Unreal Engine 5 still has friction points that catch people off guard, especially if your background is in product visualisation or film rather than games.
The scale problem nobody warns you about
Blender uses metric units by default, but Unreal works in centimetres and expects 1 Unreal unit to equal 1 centimetre. A character modelled at 1.8 metres in Blender will import as 1.8 centimetres in Unreal unless you scale on export. This sounds minor until your client messages you at 11pm asking why their character is the size of a thumbnail. Setting the FBX export scale to 100 in Blender fixes it, but you need to know to do it.
What works well
The Send to Unreal plugin, maintained by Epic, has genuinely improved the pipeline. You can push assets directly from Blender without touching an FBX file, and it handles skeletal meshes and animations with reasonable reliability. For static props, the workflow is now close to frictionless if your naming and pivot points are correct from the start.
What still causes headaches
Material translation is still rough. Blender's Principled BSDF does not map cleanly to Unreal's material system, so any complex node setups you built in Blender need to be rebuilt inside Unreal. For a freelancer, this is either extra billable work or a surprise you absorb. Rigged characters with shape keys also require manual conversion steps that add at least 2 to 3 hours per character to a project.
The clearest advice: agree on a technical delivery checklist with your client before modelling starts, not after the first import fails.