Blender: UE to Rigify, Location Keys Deleting

Development Character & Animation
1

I hope that somebody can assist me with this issue!

In Blender, I am able to create animations using the “UE to Rigify” rig that has been generated automatically. The animations work fine, associate properly to the armature, and I can export/import to UE without issue.

The problem is when I close Blender and re-open it, and attempt to load in the same exact file to continue working.

Upon reload, the Armature is no longer connected to the Rig. The Rigify Rig still has the correct animations on it (rotations and location keyframes are all present) with the correct Action items associated with those animations.

When I click on the “UE to Rigify” tab on the sidebar menu the rig is re-associated with the armature again, but all of my actions associated with the rig have been moved into some sort of “SOURCE_<name of original action>” naming convention within the Action Editor, and ALL location keys associated with the rig are no longer there. The rotations are still present, but without the location keys the animations are completely useless. The original Action names are still there, but the animations are completely missing (all are now within the SOURCE_ version, but unusable due to missing location keys).

How can I reload a file and continue working on it? I would like to ensure the rig is either not dis-associated with the armature, or when I click on the UE to Rigify menu item to re-create that link again it does not delete all of the location keys and overwrite my actions with broken versions and no way to recover the deleted location keys.

Thank you for your help, if you can!

2

I solved this issue.

If anybody else has this problem, the solution is to use the LOCK icon on the UE to Rigify menu to lock the rig in place. Can reload the file and still have all animations.

However, now I have an issue where I can’t import animations from the rig, and when I use bake, the baked animation just “T Poses” the character and the bones seem to move around some but they do not animate or rotate. Importing into Unreal also shows that this is the case, solid T Posed character sort of twitching.

Various combinations of LOCKed, unlocked, selection types, and exports seem to fail, and at best I am able to get the error:

“Animation Stack rig|<animation name> does not contain any valid key. Try different time options when import.”

And upon using the manual time for the animation, the skeleton imports but only the first frame is there. It does not animate or move for the imported frames.

Any help?