Exporting FBX from blender and simple animation issues

I have a seemingly trivial issue that has caused me a headache for the last few hours.

In Blender, I have two objects: a cube and cone. I am animating the transforms of these. There are no armatures or anything. Just animating the translate channels. I export this to UE5 and only the cube is animating.

In blender, I have combined the actions into a single action before exporting. I am using Blender 4.4 and many tutorials I’ve found are different than what I see in blender. So something isn’t exporting or importing correctly here.

Any insights would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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Hello there @klove4077!

Following other cases thorough the community, Blender and Unreal do have a tendency to clash with each other in different scenarios, specially animations.

First approach would be to reset export/import settings in both programs. After that, please follow the method below, it has brought good results in previous projects:

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Thank you for the quick response. I’ll give this a try tonight.

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Last time I did this was early UE4. The most flexible (and certainly supported) way to animate is through skeletal mesh, which that video suggests.

I’ve used a bunch of combinations of UE versions and Blender versions and that never caused me problems. Can confirm though that UE5.4.4 and Blender 4.3 work together nicely as well. In the latest UE version(s) you should also see some changes on the FBX importer (Interchange plugin)

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The culprit behind this issue was Blender. It has a more complicated (powerful?) way of organizing animations by default than I ever saw in Maya. When you export a scene from Blender as a .fbx you have to uncheck NLA Strips and All Actions in the FBX dialog box.

Interesting, this works for me with a skeletal mesh based animation:

My animations are stored as actions on the skeleton, just like I do here:

Animation action names when importing FBX

That thread also shows how to deal with animation names when exporting and importing, with the new Interchange setup

Hey @brs-sebascova ! I am currently trying to export an fbx file of a hand from Blender to Unreal. However, I am having trouble with the skeleton and bone weights when using the normal export tool (Unreal only recognizes two fingers for some reason). I used this plugin you mention and managed to export the whole hand but now each piece is separated. I don´t know if maybe you have information regarding this type of export.

UPDATE: I already solved it, thanks anyway!