Confused about how to export a mesh with both skeleton animations and shape morphs to unreal.

Development Character & Animation
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1

So I want to export a model from Blender that consists of three meshes, each of which has some shape keys, and the whole model has one skeleton.

I can export it fine, and all the animations and the skeleton are correct, if I remove the shape keys before the export. If, however, I try to export with the shape keys, the skeleton that is being exported is not correct, bones are missing, wrong naming, and ofc animations do not work.

So far, I have tried to eliminate every possible mesh modification that is done upon export, I manually triangulated everything, I removed every possible modifier, and so on. I also tried exporting each of the mesh part seperatly. But this all did not work.

I am sure I am doing smth wrong or missing smth

I captured the issue, with just another simple setup that I did to make sure that I did not mess up anything on my original mesh and this was on a clean install of ue5 as well: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qe5HNXukICR_DKW0PecRtc5M–bmgEps/view?usp=sharing

2

I’m not well-versed in this topic but I’ve found the below, which suggests (among other things) that unchecking the option to ‘Apply Modifiers’ in the export tab will allow you to retain shape keys.

animation - Shape keys aren’t properly exported to Unreal Engine 5 - Blender Stack Exchange

3

Tried this, sadly this did not help. Shape keys are actually correctly exported it is the rig that is missing.

4

Hmm, found a way to make it.

I have to make sure that before I export the model, I have to join all the meshes together.

This is what it looks like if I don’t

image
image935×229 35.2 KB

This is what if I join it

image
image754×292 24.2 KB

At least I know a way to do it. But still, when I look at this guy’s video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uZUzqYilU4

He exports the model with separate meshes (at least it looks like the brows are separate meshes for him). So I still think I am doing smth wrong. So if someone knows what’s up, please let me know :slight_smile: