I haven’t tried skeletal meshes, animation or anything more complex than static meshes, so perhaps these types of settings matter in those instances (please let me know if that’s the case, since I have not tested them yet), but what I’ve noticed with static meshes is that no matter what transform settings I choose for FBX export in Blender, it does not appear to make any difference in UE 5.5 or 5.6.
For a basic test, I created a very basic static mesh in Blender with extruded letters on Front (F), Left (L) and Right (R) sides. My mesh is oriented with F facing along Blender’s default front axis, Y+. R is facing along Blender’s default right axis, X+.
There are various options available for both Forward and Up axis when exporting as FBX from Blender:
So, I exported eight static meshes as FBX with the following Transform options (all of them with Z for Up axis)…
First four were exported without Apply Transform selected:
- X Forward without Apply Transform
- -X Forward without Apply Transform
- Y Forward without Apply Transform
- -Y Forward without Apply Transform
The other four had Apply Transform selected:
- X Forward with Apply Transform
- -X Forward with Apply Transform
- Y Forward with Apply Transform
- -Y Forward with Apply Transform
On UE side, I first imported the eight meshes without adjusting any offset settings:
The imported static meshes all had R facing down the X+ axis, which is UE’s forward axis, and F facing down Y- axis, which is UE’s left axis. This was the case for both global and local:
I then imported all of them again, but this time with a 90-degree rotation on Z axis, so that F would face down X axis and R would face down Y axis, correctly orienting it to UE’s coordinates. This was for both global and local:
So, it seems that Blender’s transform options did not matter at all, at least when importing static meshes into UE. Did I miss anything? Has anyone tried these with skeletal meshes, animations and other cases (I haven’t tested those cases myself yet)?