I’m trying to export a rig from Maya with the animation baked in as an FBX file but when I import into UE4, the animation that plays in Persona looks different than the animation does in Maya. It’s almost as if only a couple of the bones are following the animation and the others are frozen into place? I didn’t use the Rigging toolkit for the model so there is technically no “root bone,” I’ve been selecting the whole skeleton and the mesh to export. Any idea what the problem may be? Thank you
For comfort, you only need to select the highest parent when exporting. So root bone and mesh, no need to select every single bone in the hierarchy.
It is possible that you need to enable Bake Animation in the FBX exporter settings. Note that FBX will always export the whole range of keys in the timeline, so it’s best if you have zero keys on your skeleton before exporting.
By using Bake Animation, it will add keys (temporarily) to the skeleton in the time range you define. Then that range will be exported as an animation.
Hey Denny, thanks so much for responding. I appreciate the input and your time. I actually ended up finding a fix. (after I posted this…)
I was selecting the highest bone but I also tried selecting all the bones individually to see if that helped (figured it wouldn’t hurt to try) and originally I was baking the animation in the FBX exporter settings but I think I may have done something wrong with the skeleton or keys as you suggested, not for sure what I may have set up wrong but during FBX export I was getting an error stating “Complex animation was exported as baked curves…”
So what I ended up doing was the following process (I found in another forum.)
You select the root BONE, then edit → select hierarchy, then edit → keys → bake simulation. Then, when it’s baked, you select the root bone and the hierarchy of bones and the mesh and click export selected → fbx and turn OFF bake animation inside the fbx exporter.
After I tried baking the animation this way I no longer received the error message and the animation is now playing correctly in Unreal.
Baking is a good last step solution to solving a problem like this. The error “Complex animation was exported as baked curves…” always appears for me when exporting animations and should not affect the result.
Would it be possible for me to look at your scene, so I can find what may be the issue? You should not have to manually bake the rig for your animation to end up properly in UE4.
PM me on the forums if you’re interested. 
I definitely appreciate the offer to look at my scene. I’m working as a developer/animator on an indie game project (pretty green, fresh out of college) so it is most likely is user error somewhere on my part. Let me run it by the boss (NDA and such may apply) and see if I can take you up on that offer. Any extra help would certainly help everyone on the team since we are all fairly new to using UE4. (Being an animator, this is the first time for me personally using any type of game development software)