Blender to Unreal - Initial bone rotation is not zero

Apologies if this is already answered. I looked at similar questions but could not find a solution to this.

I am trying to import a blender file to Unreal without any animation. The problem is that I am having initial rotations to the bones. In blender all the rotations are zero. After import, the rotations are visually fine but in the details panel they are not zero.

These are some suggestions I tried:

  1. Changed scene scaling to metric 0.01
  2. Applied all transformations
  3. Recalculated roll to orient all bones to global x-axis (currently all 90)

My guess is that the issue is to do with the roll of the bones, because when I change the roll then the initial rotations change in unreal. I still cannot get zero rotations for all the bones, however. Any help or suggestions are appreciated.

In blender:


In Unreal:
All four tyres are initially rotated 90 degrees in the z axis, but looks correct in the viewport. I used the default import settings.

First of all, your bones are mirrored in blender. that’s not necessarily a good thing for the rig.
Use the exact same orientation on all of the bones to avoid problems.

Second. On export you can choose the orientation of the bones. To get 0 values your Import settings must match your export.

Unreal is an L-tard-handed coordinate system.
In essence, you want Y forward Z Up.

For the armature itself, you want.
Primary Y, Secondary X.

Default engine import should then work, if you haven’t messed with the settings this far…

Hi, thanks for your suggestions. I have changed the orientations of the bones and rotated the object to face Y forward. For individual bone roll, I oriented each to the tail and they all became 0 roll. After import, I get an object facing backwards, and the root (Main) bone is rotated 90 degrees X and -90 degrees Z. The Kart bone has zero rotations, but the tyres have -90 degrees rotation X…

A few concerns are that in the unreal import settings the file axis direction is Z-UP (RH) and the unit is centimetres.


The object (characters in general) should be facing x forward (but export with the setting as you changed).

So the 90deg rotation seems to make sense… maybe it should be -90 thoug.
Anyway, rotate it to face X and you should be good to go.