I’m having issues importing a rigged (.FBX) character from Maya 2023 over to Unreal Engine 5: anything that’s not connected to the skeleton or the Skin Cluster is ignored and not brought over (despite having Parent Constraints in Maya). Exporting the mesh as a static mesh works, but obviously I need it to have a skeletal mesh and an animation.
I solved this back in 4.27 by importing the meshes separately and attaching them to my model using sockets, however this time the mesh is a lot more complicated and I’m still quite confident this is not the intended workflow. There are also no errors when exporting and importing the mesh.
I’ve found many more posts on this forum regarding this exact issue but none seem to be answered/resolved. Nothing in the official documentation either.
This is a very old thread, but since it’s unresolved and you’re still having issues, @Omniwiles, let me try to help!
In this case, if you want to include all meshes into a single skeletal mesh, you need to have a skin cluster. Like @Flare2B said, if you want static meshes to be attached to the skeletal mesh, you need to manually attach them to a specific bone in engine.
If you want the whole character to be exported as a single skeletal mesh, you’ll have to skin the meshes to your skeleton. For example, if you have a helmet that does not deform, but you want it to be included in the character’s skeletal mesh, you can simply select the helmet and the head joint and Bind Skin with these settings:
Thanks for your reply! I did figure it out, basically I had skin clusters in the output section of my mesh history that I couldn’t delete (I think due to me adding joints after skinning and/or issues with how I added my IK/FK switch and corresponding joints). Regardless I fixed this by duplicating my mesh and copying/over the skin weight information. It took a little cleaning up but gave me a clean history, fully functioning skeletal mesh and implementation into UE5 was successful.
