How do you Properly Import Models from Blender? FBX/GLB

Development Character & Animation
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1

I’ve spent six years now and this issue hasn’t gotten any better. the most frustrating part is that other apps can read these GLB files just fine.

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Here’s the same .GLB animation in a basic windows model viewer vs in Unreal. I’d had good luck with GLB’s in Unreal until now so I thought it’d be fine. And FBX’s are just as bad with how they never scale properly. Does anyone actually know how to get assets into this engine? I don’t understand why it’s so difficult.

2

I do not understand what is the difference between the basic windows viewer and UE in your screenshots? Apart from the arm position but that might be due to which animation is applied on the skeletal mesh actor. gltf viewers will apply and play animation directly, UE will separate skel mesh and animation. It is up to you to pick which animation you want to see and make UE play it.

  1. Can you give more precision on what is the issue?
  2. Where does this model come from?
  3. Share this glb model with us so we could test.
3

It’s the same animation on nearly the same frame but with completely different results.
Link_Y.glb (204.0 KB)
I’ve been trying to do this as part of a one week challenge to recreate as much of a game as I can, but I’ve had a major hangup in trying to import models.

This skeleton I downloaded online, FBX almost never imports animations right and I’ve had better luck uploading my skeletons as GLB’s. But for this model almost nothing I try works properly.

One issue I’ve had, I didn’t apply the scale before I started animating it so I’ve had to recreate all my animations again, that’s on my end. But I still can’t figure out a consistent work-flow for importing models into Unreal.

Basically, every format I’ve tried for importing models has had serious issues with importing into Unreal.

4

I am not familiar with FBX imports. Maybe there are some settings to tweak that would help your import. Hopefully someone else could give more details on those.

I tried importing your glb in UE 5.3.2 as well as in the gltf sample viewer from Khronos and the animation looks very similar.

  1. is the animated skeletal mesh
  2. is the skeletal mesh without animation, so with default pose.

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I cannot see a way to edit animation in UE, if that is you want to do. That would take someone more familiar with skel mesh and animation than me.

5

Huh, weird, when I imported the animation into Unreal myself it didn’t animate properly. Did you use default settings?

6

Since UE is a game engine and not just a glTF player, it expects you to do some extra animation setup: what animation you want to play and how you want it to be played and controlled.

There are different ways to animate character in UE.
Simplest way to see your animation would be to have your model as a skeletal mesh actor in the scene, and making it use the animation sequence as animation asset.

Basically you tell UE, for this skel mesh actor I want to animate using that animation sequence asset, and I want it to play on start and loop. Then you have to hit the Play In Editor button in the UE UI to see your character move.

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If you import into content browser (asset import)

  • You do not have any actor in the scene, so you would drag and drop the skeletal mesh asset in the scene or the animation sequence
  • If you drag the skeletal mesh it will create a skel mesh actor but it will not set up the animation at all, you have to go and set it up manually as shown in the screenshot
  • If you drag the animation sequence it will present your skel mesh actor as shown

If you import with the File>Import into level, UE will spawn the skeletal mesh actor into the scene but again do not presuppose what you want to do with the animation so lets all the animation settings empty for you to set it up.

You might want to have the animation play all the time on a loop but you might also want to use an animation blueprint that will switch and blend animations on your character based on user inputs for example.

More details here.