I’ve spend the last several days unsuccessfully trying to export a rigged and animated mesh with all its animations for use in UE4. I simply can’t get it to export all actions into the .fbx, no matter what I do. After reimporting the .fbx into Blender, it also shows only a single animation, so the problem doesn’t seem to lie with UE4.
I’ve checked the “All Actions” box and set Fake Users for all the actions, but no avail. The only way I could get it to work is to push all the animations to NLA and export those along with it, but I’ve been told that this would lead to problems down the road. Other than that, I’ve had no luck with different configurations or looking for help with this problem, since tutorials just seem to have it magically working, or simply export every animation separately. This does work, but it feels kinda frustrating, since I’m sure there is a way to get this to work properly.
My second problem concerns the animations once they are imported into UE4. The animations seem to be completely blank, unless I tick “EnableRootMotion”. I’ve read there are scaling problems between Blender and UE4, is this an expression of those problems? And if so, does just ticking the box fix it, or should I take other measures?
Thanks in advance to anyone that can help me out here.
I’ve come to conclusion that it is simply not possible to do anywhere near usable round trip to other software (Like Unity or some 3D software) with Blender as Blender FBX importer mangles the skeleton… I would be happy if I was just able to import FBX skeleton without incorrect results for starters.
Same seems to be true for glTF, importer totally destroys skinned models and skeletons, where as free online glTF viewers read the model, skeleton and animation clips just fine.
Maybe check out the commercial tools in Blender Market Place.
Edit: I don’t think Uefy (rakiz’s tools) and Autorig Pro Fbx export and Better FBX exist for no reason.
It doesn’t look like it. I can only find references to people requesting support for it from a few years ago to no avail and I don’t think Epic changed their mind.
Well no wonder, all the major game industry animation tools are Autodesk’s (3ds Max, Maya and Motion Builder where the FBX (Filmbox) format originated from I guess) so why would Epic choose some less industry standard format.
Edit… and the fact that FBX is partially tied to HumanIK skeleton thing they have in Maya and IIRC also in MB.
I’d already be happy if I could just get it from Blender to UE4 correctly. The Re-Import was just to try and see if the animations were exported at all.
I’m also just now entering into the world of scaling woes that crop up between Blender and Unreal and I’m a little shocked that something that seems like it’d be simple is this much of a hassle.
If there’s absolutely no other way, I’ll probably end up doing it this way, although it’s a little supering that one might have go out of their way and buy third party tools to make a simple export to Unreal possible. Hopefully this’ll change in the future with the funding from Epic, but that won’t help me now when I’m strapped for time.
I’ve kept trying and digging and looks like the scale armature to 100 way still seems to work to make armatures and animations the right size. I’ve run into a new problem, though: Bones seem to go entirely wrong in UE4. Is Uefy really the only way to properly interface between Blender and UE4?
In general, reason for this are in Blenders limited interpretation of joints and connections between these… It isn’t an insult but a fact. I’ve tried to iterate this in the past, with weak results… see threads:
Import and export:
And here, on the nature of joint orientation in Blender (see my answers, it got a bit toxic TBH):
It doesn’t help too much… the sad fact is that you’ll have to go through some constraint nightmare on untouched rigs that are suitable for UE.
Infact, I just came across new project, by Jim Kroovy (seems to be a very skilled guy) - he has a new (FREE!) project called “Mr Mannequins Tools”. I don’t think he has a thread here in Blender Artists.
Just do google and see his Youtube videos and Reddit discussions. He talks about the same issues - why export / import to/from Blender doesn’t work properly. It might not be exactly what you are looking for, as he has done complete pipeline for mannequin only, but he iterates the core issues that cause the headaches. You get some good info and hopefully can dodge some issues you have now…
Edit: This sounds interesting, quoting Jim Kroovy, from his UE forum thread: "i’ve started work on a script to make any Blender built armature compatible with my export script " and seems like he has already shared this export code with his Patreon Patrons.
\It might be with combining all the animations in the NLA editor before exporting I have a rudimentary NLA editor tutorial that will help you get familiar with the tool if you are not familiar with it…however my tutorial does not cover in full how to combine animations but the principle is there
