Importing Squash/Stretch scale animations, from maya

Hi hi,

Having some problems importing animations into UE4 when they have a scaled animations, like squash and stretch.

First - see image below, when I DO get scaled animations to work, here just on the mesh, not in a skeletal rig, the normal map has some issues with it (right most box has the same material applied as the others. ). Any idea how to compensate for this? The mesh scales down almost to 0, in order to have it pop into existence. I’ve seen with tests that other types of scale animations dont have as many problems with the normal map, for example if it doesn’t shrink as much, or squashes halfway, etc.

ScaleAnimations_tests_01.png

Second, I tried translating that information to a skeletal rig, and animating the scale of the joint. This doesnt seem to work at all! I cant get any set up (hierarchy, parent constraints, scale constraints etc) to work, they come into unreal as though they had no animation at all.
I see its possible here: FBX Animation Pipeline in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.2 Documentation , so does anyone know if I have to use a non-joint method, like blend shapes, morph targets etc? I really want this popping effect and there’s FAR too much animation to do it in UE4 itself.

Any insights would be appreciated! Thanks!