Hi! I’m a professional dev, but I know next to nothing about 3D modelling and animation. I took a dive in this week, and I think I understand the basics of how it all works, but I’m having a really hard time simply getting models, armatures, and animations into and out of Unreal. (I’m on 5.2)
I’m not an artist, so my preferred workflow would be to use a known armature (e.g. Manny, or one from Mixamo). Then, I can import animations for that armature into Unreal to prototype quickly. Then, I can pull those animations into Blender, tweak them, and reimport them to Unreal. This has proved to be basically impossible for me, for whatever reason.
I can export the basic Manny SKM to get started, import that into Blender, and create a simple animation. That’ll export to Unreal just fine. But if I change it and re-export, Unreal yells at me that “Mesh contains the root bone in the description, but animation does not contain that bone track”. (Sorry for the poor writeup, but this is one of many different errors that I’ve gotten that seemingly come out of nowhere).
I’ve tried exporting just the mesh to one FBX and just the animations to another FBX. I’ve tried using skeletal meshes from different places. I’ve tried the Send to Unreal tool developed by Epic. I’ve watched a bunch of tutorial videos and forum threads. I feel like I’m going borderline insane by trying, in my mind, the simplest possible workflow and seeing it turn into a fiery nuclear explosion before my own eyes.
TLDR; What is the simplest possible workflow for importing skeletal meshes and animations, tweaking them, and reimporting them? I’d happily throw someone a $20 for half an hour of their time if they could walk me through it on a Discord call or something.