Blender -> UE5.2: Importing Animation only partially imports each animation.

So I’ve run into an odd occurrence when importing an FBX file into UE5.2; Upon importing only parts of some animations are present. For example, I am making a simple flower-bloom animation (Demo attached). Within blender the animation plays just fine without any noticeable issues. However, when imported into UE5.2 the petals do not animate, but the center piece does. All animations/poses are present, but only the keyframes which affect the center piece are being imported; I verified this by reimporting the exported FBX file back into blender and the animations play just fine.

Upon import to UE no warnings/errors popup and all the bones are there in UE, so I’ve little idea why this is happening.

Some things that I have tried, and nothing has seemed to have an effect:

  • Renaming bones and remaking each action/animation (no change).
  • Messed with various export/import options.
  • Messed with poly count (this affects blender sometimes).
  • Messed with various options on bones.
  • Tried recreating the issue with other exports, but I cannot recreate the issue.

I’ve never had an issue like this before when importing FBX from Blender into UE, so I’m fairly stumped. I’d appreciate any insight on what might be causing this issue.

Other notes:

demo1

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Would this plugin help?

Issue is happening in 5.3 for me as well. If you found a work around please let me know.

I went and imported the same FBX into a 5.1 project and the animation imports properly and animates just as in Blender. Sadly, migrating the animation to the 5.3 project didn’t help, as the migrated animation showed the same symptoms as the original import into 5.3.

Side note, I also tested the Blend File Importer which basically just allows the content drawer to understand blend files. Same issue occurs, as I expect the importer basically just tells the drawer to read it as an fbx with an auto fbx exporter options being applied.

I’ve had some success with exporting to FBX, reimporting into a fresh Blender file, then re-exporting it to FBX from the new file. This has worked for some animations and missing material slots as long as the thing works in the new Blender file. I still don’t know why it happens, so I don’t have a “true solution” to this yet, but I’ve used this as a workaround for some of the issues I’ve run into. Hopefully this will help you out some too.

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