Blender .FBX Skeleton & Animation Export?

I was just trying to check out moving some assets over from UDK 3 to UDK 4 and hit this wall with that file format is not supported.

IE I was using blender to export skeletal meshes and animations. As far as I am aware of it is not currently possible to export .FBX Files from blender into UDK without real issues. I tried before when working out our content pipeline about a year ago. I just tried again and the model is scaled way down and rotated the wrong direction while the skeleton is correct. I had this problem before in the UDK 3 which is why I went the .PSK / .PSK route with blender and that worked fine in UDK3.

So what your saying is our content pipeline is not valid for UDK 4 :frowning: that blender is pretty much not supported and they want you to go with some expensive development suite after they just made such a huge jump to the 5% revenue approach.

I am sad, yes I saw another thread about this format as well, but this was to ask if anyone else has skeleton and animation exportation from blender working. If so can you please provide version details and any special setup instructions that you did to get it to work. Again PSK/PSA is the only working method I have for blender to UDK3 and I still had to go in and edit the script file a little bit to get that to work.

Thanks in Advance but if this isn’t possible then moving the project over is defiantly not possible.

Tutorial: Blender to UDK Player Model and Blender UDK Character FBX.
There is apparently a new FBX exporter too, though I haven’t used it.

I will have to check it and try it again - but if I remember right that first tutorial is an old outdated one that I tried using before. But Tomm I will give it a go with a fresh install and see what happens.

I haven’t tested skeletal meshes specifically, but I’ve had 0 issues with exporting FBX from Blender. An Epic dev from another forum even specifically said that you can use Blender to get stuff into the engine. It’s too bad that the Maya plugin is exclusive to it, but it’s not required, and with the engine now practically open source, and the ease of making Blender plugins, there’s hope for even more Blender support in the future. :slight_smile:

Edit: Just tested importing skeletal meshes and animation from Blender, no issues at all. Granted, I’m still on the beta, but I can’t imagine that anything would have changed in this department from my version to the main version.

With what version of blender and what version of FBX Plugin with what settings? Just following the above tutorial? Like I said tomm if nothing comes up I will attempt it again.

I am currently using blender 2.66a with the stock fbx plugin and I want to say some script changes. I Will have to try a fresh install I guess.

Whoa, update your Blender for sure. Lots of FBX changes between now and that version. I’m on 2.69, and 2.7 is supposed to have even more FBX improvements.

I’m just using the default FBX exporter with default settings, nothing fancy at all. I do need to rotate my rigged meshes 90 degrees from the rig for them to import correctly, or I guess I could set the correct coordinate system in the FBX exporter settings. DON’T rely on the exporter to scale up skeletal meshes, scale it manually in Blender. Otherwise your rig will scale up but not your mesh itself.

In the beta version I had to export e.g characters from blender like that:

  1. scale up the rigg to 85
  2. select the mesh and also scale it up to 85
  3. Probably you also have adjust the rotation -> in my case I had to rotate it -90? on the x-axis
  4. now just export it normally

if things haven’t changed to much the main problem is still that blender adds an “armature” bone to the root of the rig when you export via fbx.

when i have the latest UE4 i’ll look into doing some blender to UE4 videos in the mean time your more than welcome to post small requests on my support thread https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?33-Geodav-s-UE4-tutorials-and-support-thread

Okay that was a little bit of a pain and I still do not fully understand all the relationships of everything I just did.

But Yes I am able to import a Skeletal Mesh and Skeleton & even though not lined up correctly in Blender they turn out okay in UE4.

I am also Able to remove the root bone from that above initial tutorial so I do not believe that is an issue

I am also able to import animation for that skeletal mesh and get them to work as well and that took some effort playing around too and this is probably where I have the most relationship questions you could say. going to do some more testing.

Defiantly a front to back tutorial with some more in depth information would be helpful though.

When i import my character from blender Hes into the middle where his hips are…I dont know what to do…

I had the same problem when I tried to animate my skeletal mesh. It was a scale issue for me. Make sure what you animate is the same scale as what you imported.

Actually that sounds right THANKS!! I remember making a game a short time ago with unity and my skeletal mesh was in the same manner and it was because the armature wasnt the same scale as the mesh itself, so i had to reset the scale to 0 ThANKS!!!

Wow I actually helped someone rather than asking for help for a change… I am SPECIAL lol

Could anyone find a solution to the rotation problem, other than rotating the character by 90° around X in Blender? Whatever I select in the exporter, my character appears face-down in UE4.

Just don’t scale in the exporter. Use scale = 1.0 in the exporter and scale the model in Unreal Scene, use Blender default unity as cm or blender world scale to Metric and change to 0.01 but don’t scale in the exporter.
I need to dig it further but look that the best metric workflow is set Metric to 0.01 and always keep scale 1.0 in exporter

Okay, I just tried it again without anything special (default settings in both Blender’s FBX export and UE4’s import) and it works just fine. Character is standing upright, I get animations when I tick the box while importing, scale is fine too. Thanks :wink: