[5.8 reimport has no effect for skeletal mesh]

Unreal version 5.8

I have created a skeletal mesh for a weapon and set it up in the editor. Then today I wanted to reimport it because the geometry was updated.

  1. When pressing reimport it still keeps the old geometry

2026-06-30 09_06_37

But nothing changes. I know 100% that the actual source model file was changed. Because when I import it as a new file (not reimport into this asset) then the updated geometry shows up.

And when I manually import into the same folder then it will show this message:

This basically forces to overwrite the static mesh version of it. Which will then show the updated geometry. But I need the skeletal mesh version to be updated. And I would like to do that in this asset, because it is already integrated and posed in animation sequences.

I also tried deleting intermediate and ddc folders and restarting from Rider, but the skeletal mesh keeps insisting on using geometry that physically does not exist like that any more in the original FBX file.