Blender to UE4 using UE4 animations?

Development Character & Animation
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Hey Kenny! :slight_smile: First off sorry for not replying to your PM yet, its been a bit of a busy weekend.

I think I can answer your questions here though. I think is using the Animations already inside UE4 with a Skeleton that he Exported from UE4 too Blender and then back into UE4 with a custom, Make Human, mesh skinned to it.

Skeletal Meshes can be exported from UE4 as FBX by Right clicking on the Skeletal Mesh Asset in the content browser and from the drop down menu choosing “Export.” The FBX can then be imported into Blender and it includes a Mesh and a Skeleton. But in order for it to have skeleton you need the very latest version of Blender (2.71.5), which features an updated FBX import and export script. You can get the latest version of Blender here: https://builder.blender.org/download/

However, although I can get the Skeletal Meshes for example the Shoorter Game HeroTPP our of UE4 and into Blender and back again, I have not been able to get the animations working in Blender. But to be honest you don’t need the Anims in Blender, you only need those inside UE4.

More info on Exported UE4 Skeletal Meshes -> Blender coming Soon! :slight_smile:

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@ DyotoOrion - No worries man! I’ve been working with the free files from the 3rd Person Shooter tutorial and, so far, they work fine with Blender. I did have to use the Blender .fbx fix you suggested. And I find that you have to assign a skeleton on import - as opposed to selecting ‘none’ and letting UE4 create one (another part of the issue I was having before I think). I haven’t had the chance to try it out with your stuff yet but I think that’s on the plate tonight. I also gathered from the #rd Person Tutorial that most of the animations ‘should’ work with most of the skeletons as well. They just need to be retargeted so I might dig into that and see how far it goes.

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If you right-click on a skeletal mesh asset in the Content Browser, you will get an option to “Export”. That option will let you export as an FBX.

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I know this is an old thread, but I’ve been fighting with this for several days, and I’ve made some progress that might be useful to other people.

I want to be able to use the Epic animations plus any that I develop myself. This means I really want the skeleton to look normal, in particular to have the bones connected, so IK works in the way I would expect. Nothing I tried would make this work: my animations would import fine, but the Epic animations would have bits of the geometry twisted round all over the place.

I think this happens because in Blender the local Y axis always lies along the bone. In Maya you place joints as well as bones, and they can have any coordinate space. (If anyone here knows Maya, I’d be interested if you can confirm that this is correct.) This means that some of the bones in the Epic skeleton have a Y axis that doesn’t lie along the bone. These can be imported into Blender fine, by applying appropriate transformations, but the information about the local coordinate space is then lost. When you export them again, the bones appear to be twisted. When you use a standard Epic animation, this twist gets reversed, resulting in geometry sticking out at funny angles.

This is a real nuisance because it means the Epic skeleton can’t really be represented in Blender at all. It’s not an issue with the importer, it’s an issue with Blender itself and the way it does armatures. (That’s not to say that Blender is worse, it’s just different.)

I have found a work-around, though. What you do is pull the skeleton into Blender and clean it up. Get all the bones connected that should be connected. In some cases the joints don’t seem to be in quite the right place; feel free to move them so you end up with a well proportioned humanoid skeleton. You then design your character around it, and export it back to Unreal. When you import it into Unreal, you import it as a new skeleton, rather than asking it to share the standard Epic one.

Now you choose the Humanoid rig for the skeleton you just imported. There is no effort involved in associating bones with the rig, because the names are obviously the standard Epic ones. You can now retarget any standard animations that you want to use with your skeleton, and this seems to work well. Importantly, it deals correctly with bones that are in different coordinate spaces.

It’s a nuisance having to do the retargeting, but there is a bonus in that you can make changes to the skeleton’s proportions without ruining the animations. You just have to make sure the retargeting options are set correctly for each bone. They default to Animation but as far as I can see, most of them should be set to Skeleton. They only affect displacement (not rotation) and things like the length of a character’s leg should be fixed by the skeleton.