[BLENDER] What to do with all the control / helpers bones exported to FBX ?

Development Character & Animation
1

I have an exporter to Doom 3 models/anims format. It allows me to export only base (deformation bones), stripping any helping/control bones off (and not breaking anims!)

FBX exporter exports everything into FBX file. How can I remove all the unnecessary bones after bringing character into UE4 ?

Thanks.

2

Export with Only Deform Bones checked in the FBX exporter in Blender.

3

There is a flag in the export settings for FBX to export “Only deform bones” in the armatures tab of Blender (2.76b) as well. But you have to switch this deform flag for every bone off and on manually (actually it would be easier if this would be done via some weight-check I guess). I’ve removed the deform flag for my own IK bones and it’s poles and it looks like it should in UE4 (only deform bones and the armature called “root”).

4

Ah, that’s cool. Sounds easy enough! :slight_smile: Thanks folks.

5

Ideally you would do this when rigging, you need to do this if you use automatic weights anyway.

For someone who needs to do it for a bunch of bones you can write a script instead of doing it for every bone manually:



import bpy

for bone in bpy.context.selected_bones:
    bone.use_deform = False

Just select the bones in edit mode and run this from the text editor, it will remove the deform checkbox from the bone. Having IK bones marked as deforming bones could be useful though, then you can use IK inside UE4 and have them as targets.