Bones look weird after importing UE4 Standard Mannequin

Hey there guys!

I wanted to learn about animation, using Blender. So I thought I’d take the chance to import the standard mannequin found in UE4. The model got a nice and detailed rig that I could do some animation with. I’m not interested in facial animation at the moment, but more body animations.

So after import, the model looks like this:


All the bones are just…pointing outwards? Can I do something to fix this perhaps? Or would I have to redo the entire rig? :frowning:

I wanted to attached the FBX as well, but the forum won’t let me.
Hope you fine folks here at the Blender forums can help out a noob!

Not sure how to fix it but I think this is a problem with Blender having Y axis for bones instead of Z, no idea why they wont let us simply change it
Also check your Import options maybe.

After you select the model to import, in the import options (left panel) click on the “Armatures” tab and check the “Automatic Bone Orientation” option.

This is because of the Maya rig having bone orientations that are not allowed in Blender. If you check Automatic Bone Orientation on import it will look better, but it will then not export to UE4 the right way because you changed all of the bone orientations so it’s no longer compatible with the UE4 skeleton.

I don’t really recommend using the UE4 mannequin rig that way at all, instead you could use an addon like UE4Tools (http://www.lluisgarcia.es/ue-tools-addon/) that has a control rig and the orientations set up to be reasonable within Blender. It’s still not compatible with the UE4 mannequin skeleton but you can either retarget your animations to the UE4 mannequin (will be 100% accurate) or just use the UE4Tools as your rig instead and retarget UE4 animations to your new UE4Tools skeleton.

A friend wants me to do this, make a character model in blender, weight paint it and export to FBX for a UE4 game. Any chance someone could list out the object names, bone names parenting and orientations that need to be set in blender for it to work in EU4?

largely because I’m going to have to manually make this rig from scratch.