Export multiple animated objects into Unreal as one object?

[Stooovie]

I have animated a graph (100 3D columns growing in Z scale) in Blender. There are no armatures or poses, just simple Scale keyframes on each objects, staggered in time.

Is there any way to import this into UE5 as a single animated object? Right now it imports as 200 separate objects (last way I tried imported 9207 objects into UE!!). The “combine meshes” option is not available when importing animations. The FBX does have “Bake Animation” checked on export.
The plan is to add this animation to a map and the sequencer for video work. I’m a video guy, not a programmer

Tried the Epic Games’ Send2UE with same results. If there isn’t a way, how would you go about assembling this into a single entity that can be easily manipulated in a UE level? Thanks!

[RPaladin]

This post might be useful:

Join objects and keep animation

This might be hard… but can be done. Duplicate your face mesh for however many shapekeys you have. Delete all the other shapekeys so you have only one shape applied per mesh. Duplicate your body mesh and join this body mesh too all the face meshes. Now select whichever face+body you want as the default, create a base shapekey. Select the default mesh follow by shift selecting (so both are select) the mesh with one of the deformations. Go to “Scripts Window” “Scripts” “Mesh” “Rvk1-Rvk2” A…