After importing a skeletal mesh from blender into UE 5.1 I had the below issue where the joints appear very large in editor. The animations work as expected, the mesh is scaled correctly and deforms fine but the bones just look big. A quick fix was that the bone draw size slider still affects them as expected but in control rig I had issues with the scale of controllers that I added (they were big too).
5.1 skeleton
When looking at the same skeleton in 5.0 the mesh looks as expected but it also let me see that the ‘tail’ of the joints look different too. In 5.1 the bones point to the joint below the selected one in the hierarchy, but in 5.0 the selected bone is the one that is pointed to.
5.0 skeleton
I could find one other recent post that has a similar looking issue (Skeletal mesh bones are too big) so it may be a bug but I can’t tell if it is exactly the same. I can always use 5.0 but I got myself all excited to use 5.1 so any help would … help. Thanks.
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The way things “look” has nothing to do with anything in any version of the engine.
The question you have to ask is if everthing works as expected given then same skeleton and the same animation.
Good point. Thanks for the reply.
I hadn’t actually tested animations on the mesh when I posted my issue. Now that I have, animations work in both versions as expected.
Looking at other Skelly meshes in 5.1 I don’t have the same issue (I looked at the third person mannequins) so its probably something with the rig itself but I have no idea what could be causing it.
Okay… I’m an idiot. But will post this as solved just in case anyone else makes this mistake and runs into this.
I am relatively new to blender (used to use 3ds max) so it took me a while to see that when I imported the skelly mesh from blender the root bone’s scale was 100 (rather than 1) in UE and apparently that is a common problem.
This video [Blender to Unreal Engine 5] Correct FBX Export Settings for Characters - YouTube showed me a work around. Once I followed that it seems to have sorted it.
Something must be different between the engine versions as it was very hard to tell that anything was wrong in 5.0, but in 5.1 it was obvious in the skeletal mesh asset window that the bones were 100x bigger.
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