I’m working on a series of rigs for teaching animation with the end goal having them in UE4 so students learn the UE4 FBX animation pipeline from day one on the course. My first rig is a simple ball rig with a stretchy bone as shown in this gif:
The bone stretches based on a second bone at the end of it which is in turn linked to a control object, I’ve given the stretchy bone a scaleXYZ controller to ensure that the FBX export process can bake the resulting scale values into the bone.
Importing into 3DSMax gives me the ball, with bones that animate and scale as desired.
Importing into UE4 gives me the ball, with the top bone that animates (translation) but no scaling on the main bone.
Has anyone had any experience or success with stretchy bones in UE4, is there a trick to it or is it currently not supported?
Are you using 4.1 build? Did you try to import with “Preserve Local Transform” option in the animation section? If that still doesn’t work, can I get the FBX link for me to try out?
Thanks for the help, I tried “Preserve Local Transform” and it didn’t make any difference to the resulting animation. This is what i get inside UE4’s animation editor.
With the bone selected the transform values are all 1.000000, 1.000000, 1.000000 for local, component and reference at all frames, this is why I assume it isn’t importing the scale values of the animation for the bones.
Thanks again,
Stu
Edit: When importing to max, it only works if under “bone creation” in the fbx import dialog I select “Bone conversion: Leave as bones” if I choose “Convert as Dummy” it doesn’t work.
In case you still wish to know; you should export the squash and stretch animations with the “resample all” option enabled (at least, it is that way for 3D Studio Max, not sure if it works for all FBX exporters); that should bake the squash and stretch straight into your animation (just baking it normally apparently leaves out certain information, like squash and stretch). I am not sure about compatibility with older UE4 versions, but on UE4.10 it works.
Hey, I know it’s been a while, but I’m facing the exact same issue you had. I turned on “resample all” and it still just moves the bone without the squash/stretch. If it’s not too much trouble could you let me know what your export settings in 3DS Max and import settings in UE4 look like? Thanks!