I’m having trouble importing some motion capture animations into Unreal 5.1 from Blender. My base skeletal mesh with sample animation imports into UE just fine, but subsequent animation imports (just the armature) end up breaking the animation. Some of the joints seem to be rotated the wrong way:
(the hands are equally terrifying)
I’ve already set the unit scale in Blender to 0.01 and froze the transforms (ctrl+a, scale and rotation) before exporting both the skeletal mesh and armature. I used pretty much default FBX export settings in Blender and default FBX import settings in UE. I’ve tried changing various settings that I found from other forum posts, but nothing makes any discernable difference. I’ve tried changing the retarget settings, but that hasn’t fixed the issue either.
I had one last idea: maybe the inverted mesh used to create the “line-art” effect was messing with the retarget. So I opened the original, deleted that modifier so it was just the normal mesh, exported the mesh and armature as FBX, imported the skeletal mesh and animation into UE, looked fine. But importing another animation armature (made with the same skeleton I should add) still had broken feet:
The bone weights are fine as far as I can tell, the original skeletal mesh has no issues.
To clarify: I have a bunch of .bvh files from mocap sessions. I imported one into Blender as an armature and bound it to a mesh using the parent → armature with automatic weights (I’m not a rigger). That looked fine in Blender, so I exported the mesh and armature as a .fbx file. I then imported the fbx into Unreal, importing the mesh, skeleton, and animation. It looks fine in Unreal. Then I import other mocap .bvh files into Blender, the animations look fine, so I export the armature as fbx.
Now here’s the problem. In Unreal, I import the fbx file with the armature and animation, selecting the previously-mentioned skeleton object. When I import and preview the animation, the mesh is all broken like above. The skeletons are the same, with the exact same bone structure (they were created from the same mocap setup), so I don’t understand why one animation will work, but others won’t.
Okay I figured it out. I kept trying to fix the animations, but the problem was the rig. The target skeleton does have the same bone structure, but some of the joints were rotated in it’s rest pose. That’s why animations were not working properly.
I just had to unparent the original armature, import one from a mocap animation, and then use that to rig the mesh. It’s a crude rig (even worse than before) but at lease all the mocap animations are applying correctly.
