If I can add some feedback regarding the current state of Unreal animations:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/deve…tion-in-unreal
I gave up on the skeletal animation thing. That’s not made for people not used to game design. The entire concept is going to be very alien to anyone in product design, engineering or architecture.
What I ended up doing, since I needed to finish up a project right now, was to re-do the animation using the level sequencer. It works just like basic animation in both 3D Studio Max and Blender, though I don’t know if you can have IK relations in it.
Re-doing animations already set up in an external 3D app isn’t ideal, though.
I really hope for that the future of Datasmith does not have to involve skeletal animations, but rather keep the more simpler and straight forward transform keyframe system. Skeletal animation might make sense for movie industry and gaming industry animators, but that’s a highly specific skill that I hope us Datasmith users won’t have to learn. Plus, if something was made with one system, I don’t see why it has to be converted to the other system just to be imported into Unreal. Especially, when the engine seems to have support for it with the sequencer.
In general, this is another thing that wasn’t an issue at all in Unity, but similar to the outliner, seems to be extremely under-developed in Unreal, which is very surprising! The level sequencer has a quite intuitive and powerful interface, though, which was very welcome.
(In the future, one could also perhaps envision Datasmith supporting Solidworks simulation animations directly… but that’s very far in the future, I’m guessing.)