I would like to know if it’s possible to export simple animation directly to Unreal Engine.
So far all the info and tutorials are geared towards (character) Rigged animations.
I just want to simply export (baked) moving objects.
Like just a simple default cube move animation from one position to the other.
I thought that just exporting as FBX or glTF with animations check would do the trick.
But nothing’s happening.
Do I really need to use the NLA or add bones to export an animation to Unreal Engine?
In a word, yes. Unreal only supports importing animation as either a rigged-and-skinned mesh or as point cache ( like a cloth sim would require).
Your animated object needs only one bone to be a valid skeleton, in which case the weighting of all the vertices is set to 1 and assigned to just that single bone. This will import no problem with whatever animation you have on the BONE.
This might seem unnecessary for a single mesh animation but it has massive benefits when you have multiple meshes and animations where any animation can be used with any mesh that uses the same ‘skeletal’ structure ( even if that is only one bone).
But in the meantime I figured it out, Simply using Unreal’s Inbuilt FBX importer instead of the data-smith version does the trick. Later I’ll show which of the imported asset should be used if you want, right now I’m on the Job.