Hello. As the title mentioned above I’m having trouble importing a mesh with animation that rotates around its own axis from Maya into the UE4.
I have already tried several options, including baking the animation and exporting it as fbx. I also played around with the import settings in Unreal, which didn’t really help either.
Is there an exact solution to this?
There is no way to import an animation with a skeleton as all animation data is stored on the skeleton. However, if your skeleton is similar to, or an exact match to the UE4 Skeleton, try selecting that as the import skeleton target upon importing your FBX file and see if it corrects any issues. A lot of time with importing and exporting skeletons in 3D Programs, the default settings of those programs rotates bone axis.
UE4 only recognises animation data when linked to a skeleton
If you want to do some basic static mesh animation, I would recommend doing it in blueprints using timelines, curves and relative rotation/position adjustments.
If you want to do your animations in Maya and deform the mesh in any way (i.e. rigged), then you can make a very basic skeleton in Maya that’s rigged to your object and import that into UE4. Think of it like a really really simple human (like a bug).
You will need to import it as a skeletal mesh, complete with a skeleton, a physics asset and then you can import FBX anim data.
Hope that helps
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