I made this very simple “excatavor arm” model in blender, and the skeleton, which all works exactly as I’d expect it to in blender. (My goal is to be able to control each joint to manipulate the arm, instead of having pre-baked animations.) The problem is when I try to export to fbx and then import it to UE5, I get any number of results that I can’t make sense of.
For example, this time I tried joining what I could in blender, but it then imports both segments as a single rigid mesh that does not pivot in the middle like it should. Also everything always rotates around the origin (in the blender scene) instead of around the end of the bone or the origin of the individual mesh.
I know the correct process (whatever that might be) should take maybe 15 minutes to actually do, and I’ve spent two days trying every possible combination/permutation I can think of and nothing works. (And none of the tutorials I can find are applicable to what I’m trying to do.)
Thanks in advance!
I’ve made a little progress (maybe?) but still unable to get it to move using script. What I did was for each “segment” of the arm, delete the other two segments and export the one segment (with the entire armature) at a time. Then imported each of those three separately into UE5, which causes it to import them as skeletal meshes. Now if I tell the script to rotate any of the segments, it does rotate the “root” bone, but the other two bones will not move, nor do they stay attached to the root, so they still act like three independent meshes.
I tried putting the “base” part on the poseable mesh and then put each of the arm segments as child meshes to the base. I also tried putting each of the three in a poseable mesh of their own, both all child to the DefaultSceneRoot, and also in a parent/child hierarchy, also replacing any of them with the default scene root. None of those things make a difference.
Holy crap I got it working! I’m posting the solution here so hopefully the next person won’t have to spend 4 working days to solve a 30 second problem.
Instead of using the rigging/animation/bones in blender, I just used a parent/child relationship with the meshes themselves, so I had base, UpperArm, and ForeArm.
In the actor, add a poseable mesh component (as child to default scene root) and select your newly-imported thingy as the “Skeletal Mesh” and in blueprints you manipulate them with “Set Bone Rotation/Transform by Name”
