So I imported my UE4 based skeletal mesh to Blender in order to make some animations. I saw somewhere here that I should check Auto bone orientation when importing the .fbx file. The auto orient works fine inside Blender, but when I export the animation to UE4, it becomes all messed up.
With Auto Bone Orient
Everything works fine without the Auto orient bones option, except the armature looks ugly in Blender and makes it kind of hard to animate there.
Just don’t rotate them. If you are going to create more animations you would most likely create some helper bones (e.g. for IK) or replace the octrahedral bones with some custom ones (like arrows, boxes and so on) anyway. But even if not… you could just import your skeleton twice. First time without auto-rotation. Second time with auto-rotation. Don’t rotate any bones so far and pick every bone of the first import and make it a child of the bone with the same name of the second import via a bone constraint in the pose mode (see screenshot below). Don’t forget to hit the “set inverse” button. If you are done you could just hide the “wrong” rotated bones of your first import via “M” button and move it to some other layer. Animate with the second and better looking auto-rotated bones. Before you export just make sure you set all bones of the first import to “Deform” and all the auto-rotated Bones of your second import to not-Deform. So you could differ which ones should get exported and which not. This would be too much work if you just need some quick modification but if you would do a lot of anims it’s worth to invest a bit of time to create a rig you could work with.
I did not rotate any of those weird looking red bones of the first import to get this anim in UE4 but only the blue ones from the second import (that had the auto-rotation turned on at import).
Hi, sorry for necroposting, but I have faced with same issue and surprised nothing changed after 7 years. I have set of free models and animations from Marketplace, skeleton is not standard manequin and I need to add some absent animations. When I export it as usual to Blender bones orientation and unconvinient to work with. If I use Automatic bone orientation, much easeir to to animate, but after exporting to Unreal, animation is broken. I haven’t found any import/export settings to fix it. Solution above works for some bones, but doesn’t for other (e.g. works with spine, but doesn’t with tail). Currently I have found only one solution: export twice with automatic and without, create/change animation, remove animation from original import (iwhout aotu orientation) and retarget (which will create animation again from auto oriented import). But overal workflow seems complex, maybe there is other solution?
Example of solution above:
first frame is ok by solution above
