Blender animation import problem - "empty" animations

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hi,

My problem looks as follows: when I try to import animations (.fbx) using a blender, the UE4 imports it as “empty” - that is, after trying to assign it to Skeletal Mesh, Skel mesh disappears.

UE version is 4.18.2
Blender version is 2.79
and i use FBX 7.4 binary

Thanks.

2

are you sure its empty and not just misplaced? ive noticed with blender when exporting with the FBX 7.4 Binary (from your blender-export-settings picture) the mesh is usually not facing the right direction, or underground, or some other weird issue. when exporting from blender try setting the version to ASCII (i know its version 6.something, i think theres only two options). When you do this, it will be facing the right way, but way too small so also set the scale up to 100.

3

Agree with ViceVersa that this might be the issue you have. Little tip if you don’t know how to quickly find the mesh inside Animation Asset window. Open Skeleton Tree tab (Window → Skeleton Tree), select any bone and press “F” to frame to that bone.

4

This is messed up. Was bugging be for a while. Turns out all I had to do was rename my character in blender from ‘armature’ to anything else.

2 Likes
5

Wow. Thank you so much, solved my issue as well.

6

This solved a headache that I’ve been working on for a day now, thank you so much!

7

An elegant solution Frank. Thank you
For any engineers looking to remove code that may be impeding their team, in UE4.18.3, you can just comment out the part of FbxMainImport.cpp that searches for the Blender armature bone in FFbxImporter::GetRootSkeleton around line #1680-1690
-Spiris

8

Thank you! What a ridiculous bug.

9

Thank goodness for this answer, it was driving me crazy. Worked a charm

10

Seconding this solution- Unreal uses the name “Armature” to find where the skeleton & animations are stored. If the armature isn’t named as such, or if something else in the model is also named Armature, it messes everything up.

11

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boxnovel

12

This helped me a lot! Thank you so much! To think that something so simple could cause so much trouble.