Animating a weapon bone returns no animation, but the rest of the rig imports correctly. Please help.

[AreC (Mana)]

Summary:

• I’m using a UE5 compatible rig in Cascadeur.
• I added an extra “weapon” bone in Cascadeur, inside of the mannequin’s hand.
• I made an animation where the character uses the weapon bone to throw his sword.
• The weapon bone is keyframed, but has no skin weights. Its purpose is to attach various weapon meshes to in UE (using a socket inside of it), but able to be animated separately from the hand/wrist (like spinning in the palm for example).

Importing the animation to UE5 using the Manny skeleton is “successful”, everything animates correctly, except that the weapon bone has no animation like it does in Cascadeur. I tried exporting to Blender, and it is able to import the movement of the weapon bone.
I tried checking the option “Use T0 as Ref Pose”, and it makes sure the weapon bone doesn’t get removed for not having weights.

Why isn’t the animation of the weapon bone being imported?

[AreC (Mana)]

I figured it out, it’s quite simple: The bone needs weighted vertices/tris in order to import the animation information onto it. I just created a tiny triangle for the weapon bone (using Blender this time), and everything worked fine.