Imported FBX animation messing up?

Hey guys. I imported the skeleton and model for my character into UE4, and that worked just fine. Then I imported an animation for it, but it was lying down on its back, and much smaller than the regular model. I have no idea what’s causing this, but it happens every time I import an animation into Unreal. What should I do??

What software are you exporting from? I’m going to assume Maya since Blender and 3DS Max are Z-up like UE4, but Maya is Y-up which can cause the problem you’ve described.

In the .fbx exporter options there should be Axis Conversion and Units. Change Axis Conversion to Z and Units Scale Factor to 1. If these values are already Z and 1 respectively, go into Windows > Preferences > Settings and check if your Up axis is Y, and your Working Units is ‘centimeter’ (If your 3D package is set to meters and you import into UE4, it will read 2 meters as 2 cm and your import will be tiny.).

If you’re not using Maya, it’s possible that these settings are still relevant to your problem. Try to find and change them in your program and see if it fixes it.

I’m actually using Cinema 4D, which has a Y up axis. I tried rotating the model and bones, exported it, imported it… same problem. Also, I’m able to import it as a model instead of an animation and it works just fine. The animation is coming out weird though…

It’s weird that even if you rotate inside C4D it comes out wrong too, the only other thing I could find was this old answerhub but it’s for Maya:

Is your root bone set up correctly? Not parented to anything and with a rotation value of 0,0,0 and scale of 1,1,1?

It does have a rotation value, and moving it messes up the rigging in the model for some reason… I’ll re-rig this I guess, then I’ll try again. I will get back to you in a while after I finish rigging it again…

I’ve written about this before:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?67255-cinema-4d-multiple-roots-problem&p=276146&viewfull=1#post276146
The part of the post under the picture:

There’s also a possibility to scale and rotate a model on UE4 import, but i haven’t tried out this method yet.

I the scale and rotate on the UE4 import but I wasn’t sure how much to scale it by, so it came out weird. As for the post, I already saw that before this actually. I tried that but with no luck.

You could try Cactus Dans fbx exporter, it has an option for lefthanded and righthanded coordinate system as well as many other improvements compared to the standart exporter.
Static Mesh importing in UE4 works without flaws and error messages and preserves smoothing, several UV channels and material selections.
I’m not sure if you need to build your Rig for animated models with his CD rigging tools, though.