Hello answerhub!
I‘m working as a 3D generalist for about 17 years now. Most of the time I worked with Cinema4D as my main DCC tool. A few years ago I started using Unreal for my real-time stuff. Thanks to Datasmith, getting stuff into the Engine Is pretty straight forward and also the fbx exchange works well. At least for static meshes.
But in the last weeks I‘m working on a project that needs a few characters aswell. And here it gets nasty. First of all Datasmith didn‘t support skeletal meshes. Point two, the fbx export/import of C4D has no option to modify the bone rotation of your mesh. If you export a fbx SkM and import it into Unreal, every single bone will point to -Z. But originally the bones were pointing to +z. So I guess it is about converting between left and right handed coordinate systems. Even the new R23 of cinema isn‘t able to fix that.
Well the character will work. Also animation are working and at first I was happy with the pipeline. But now I noticed, when I‘m trying to use a Spline IK or any other IK in unreal with my custom character, Unteal needs the bones to point into a positive value. Otherwise the IK will be just messed up. Till now I wasn‘t able to get a working IK on my characters, when importing a fbx right from c4d.
My workaround for that is using Blender (which has a decent fbx export) to import my fbx, rotate the bones within blender and export it to unreal. I can provide a tutorial if you like?
Any suggestions how to manage that without using Blender?
