Blender FBX animation no bones

Development Character & Animation
1

TLDR; Can we export from blender an FBX file without bones an animation or is it mandatory to use bones?

As a test subject I used a box broke it apart in blender and exported and imported into unreal engine, for the most part this worked as expected, except I’m missing the animation of the box exploding, why you might ask am I using blender to blow things up when ue4 has it’s own destruction tool(s) because I couldn’t for the life of me get those to work, so i figured that blender or lightwave would be good enough to at least get a static animation of something breaking apart, I’m not working on a game but a short film, so if there is a way to import animation without bones and all that mess which I don’t actually need it would be cool to know.

Thanks for any advice.

2

i think you have to have at least three bones to import shapekeys (check import morph targets)…

3

if you set up morphs you need no armature at all, but you have to import the mesh as skeletal in engine - this will give it the root of the object or scene as the root bone.

But the short answer is No, you don’t really have a way to even export the animation to FBX without an armature since the tracks that get written are the bone tracks.

Altough, I have never tested the import into sequencer. Maybe that would/could work for you…

4

Thanks for the responses, I’m on holiday at the moment but I’ll give your suggestions a try when I return in a few days.