Hi,
I am just starting to learn animations in Unreal. I am coming from Unity.
I either do not see where it is, or Unreal just merges all skinned meshes on import held in .fbx?
I have a character where there are separate skinned meshes as an accessories, they are held in one file. In Unity I can import and easily select separated meshes, same as materials, make them visible or change them in run-time or in editor. In Unreal, everything is merged as one single mesh on import, even if in source file they are separated skinned meshes?
Is that how it suppose to be? And if yes, why? It seems destructive, to do expected, then only other way is to import everything separately and work on a system that joins things together. This would require:
More resources to load from separate files, l both run-time and in editor
It will be more work for developer to set everything up
Same model, imported as separated parts will always take more physical space
Yes you can import separate object from a same file, even if they have skin to the same rig!
In fact, this is the optimal way. First import the rig and then the model(s)
(If you already have the rig in Unreal you can go to the next step)
First import the fbx and when the options screen appear uncheck Import Mesh
In this step we only want the Skeleton Rig, so with this it will only import the rig.
Now, import the .fbx again and when the options screen appear uncheck Skeletal Mesh. Notice that when you uncheck the option, the following options will change.
(By default, if the .fbx has a skeleton, Unreal will check this option. But now we already have the rig, so we don’t want it again.)
And now, a little further down the window, in the option “Combine meshes” uncheck it. (If you cannot see this option, click in the arrow in the category “Mesh”)
So Unreal will import each object it finds in the .fbx as if it were its own asset.
Found another bad pipeline: If I import without combine meshes, even if the meshes are separated in the source file, skeletal meshes will become static meshes in Unreal.
So the only method I see now is to just simply import every single mesh with skeleton separately.
This means skinned mesh material count and skeleton will by multiplied in each fbx file and in .uasset file - insane amount of extra resources for no reason.
This modular design is the current practice supported by Unreal Engine official products. Just examine how metahumans are assembled, and its also how Fortnite characters were created using such workflow. This practice is completely different from what was done in Paragon, another development approach, in which all characters were unique, fully assembled with custom rigs, and didn’t share neither materials nor animations.
The latest example is the City Sample Crowds project.
@Roadified
I get you are new to it, and the engine totally blows so it ain’t your fault, but be a little more observant.
If you want to import several meshes linked to the same skeleton you just seelct the existing skeleton in the import options.
Now thats not to say the pipeline isn’t bust. If you say it is, I’ll take your word for it (Importing all meshes out of a skeletal mesh already assigned to the same skeleton worked OK on ue4).
But importing and assignign skeletal meshes must work, or you’d have 1001 reports of people nagging on the forums and elsewhere.
Modular characters in ue4 work ok. You have to handle a bunch of ue4 errors with rendeirng and such, but they do work.
In ue5, I wouldn’t expect much.
In fact, the fact you get someting to show up in PIE is already a small miracle considering the constant screwups they are allowed to release.
Btw, you could try to import into Ue4, then update the project to ue5.
If I had to import 100 parts of a mesh, I’d definitely try that over manually importing them one by one…
Ps:
Also it could 100% be your fault.
The skeleton/armature (whatever) has to be correctly assigned to the meshes on the file you import, or the meshes would indeed be considered static.
Yes I am new to Unreal, just like I wrote in the first sentence ;D, but I have maybe 10+ years experience with Maya and Unity engine, so I recognise what are good patterns and what are bad ones, I think :} For modular design, Unreal pattern is ok I agree, but not everything needs to be modular. Other cases should be also considered.
In my case, I have to sacrifice hard disk space (users will too), time of exporting everything separately and time to setup everything separately inside Unreal - because it seems that is the only possible solution.
In Unity I could export one character pack with all the skins, skeletons and materials to the same fbx, but I could also use what is possible in Unreal if I want to.
I am on Unreal 4.27.2 btw., my team and the other company we work with, found Unreal 5 not stable enough (for what we need) yet, but we will move to 5 eventually.
I can also import them together, but they are then merged into one skinned mesh.
I want ability to retain them separately, but also retain skinning reference to the single skeleton.
hello @Roadified . Did you succeded with this issue? I have same question. I can´t believe nobody undestand your point as your explanation was very clear. Please tell if you found a solution. Regards
I can’t find any info on this via any other searches. Is this actually possible in UE5? Surely it is? We can’t be forced into importing combined skinned meshes?
I tried the advice posted earlier in this thread however, as the OP points out. Doing this imports the individual meshes as STATIC meshes. And then there appears to be no way to convert them back to skeletal meshes with their skinning intact. Using the “convert to skeletal mesh” option on the static meshes, creates a skeletal mesh object with no skinning.
Note all my meshes use the same skeleton. What’s the deal here? I can’t be expected to export and import hundreds of separated FBX files with their own skeleton surely? I am trying this in 2024 in UE5.3.
Hi there,
Have you tried to export your combined meshes as gltf instead of fbx? There’s a thread about it in this forum. I believe UE5.3 has a import dialog that allows you to merge/separate skeletal meshes. I’ll run an example and update this post.
Steps to reproduce:
Export a Metahuman body to Blender and split the meshes: hands, pants, torso and arms
Export as glTf 2.0 (Has no scale settings, you’ll need to adjust in UE)
Import to UE 5.3 and the import option “Interchange Pipeline Configuration (Import Content)” pops up. Adjust the scale depending on your Blender scene units and object scale. Set 100 if your object is real world scale and scene’s unit scale is 1.
Go to Skeletal mesh section and uncheck “Combine Skeletal Meshes”
Hey, thanks for this. I just tried this and it seems to work atleast in importing the skeletal meshes separately. However the skeletal meshes lose all of their geometry and only show a skeleton in UE5. I’m not super familiar with gltf but I did go over the export/import options and tried to match them to what I’d expect in an fbx.
Glad to help. And my apologies I misunderstood the OP.
I believe you have to set your import scale to 100. Place the meshes in the level and check scale again. The miniatures must be visible.
In this experiment, the metahuman scale was lost, so I had to import as 100 but the correct is to setup Blender scene units to 0.01 so that skeletons exported from UE will have scale of 0.01 and meshes scale of 1.
That didn’t work unfortunately. I think my export scale is fine as when I tried importing with 100 as you mentioned, my skeleton was enormous in the preview window. Tried tweaking their materials to an opaque one as well no dice.
These meshes do import fine as an fbx, ofcourse they all get merged which is not the desired result.
Same in both instances, there is just no geometry visible. The first image there is a scale of 1, on both it shows 0 verts/triangles so I assume the gltf import is failing somehow.
