Okay… wow… this solution is convoluted. The few days this has been up, it doesn’t seem like a lot of people have shown interest in this issue, or perhaps they haven’t had this issue. Regardless, I am going to post my work around. Get your pens and note paper ready…
So, the issue here lies with the bones of the armature “being too small,” and PhAT isn’t able to correctly work with them. In addition to that, there seem to be issues with Blender adding an additional bone called “Armature” to the skeletal rig when it is exported (or whatever you happen to call your armature.) A passing remark in my research into this problem dictates that “Armature” is not a good name to use for your skeletons. Apparently, this will cause problems in some programs. I changed the name of my armature to something other than “Armature” before I exported my model.
This next step may not be important, but may also serve a purpose, as trying everything I’ve described in this post in the most recent version of Blender works. This step removes the “Armature Bone” from being exported with the FBX file.
Grabbing at anything I could try, I found an old forum post from two years ago: The trials and tribulations of Blender & Skeletal Meshes - Animation - Unreal Engine Forums . Post number 12 is the one you’d like to view. Downloading those files, and an older version of Blender, 2.77, I replaced the files in io_scene_fbx with the ones provided.
Although I had my scene set up correctly and everything was proportional to meters, I needed to use the “0.01 world scale trick.” Under the scene tab in Blender, make sure your unit length is set to metric, and the unit scale is set to 0.01. You can then press “N” to open up the additional toolbar in Blender and change your far clipping plane to something like 50m. If you have a model created already, select the armature and press “S”, then type in “100”. Doing this will rescale the model to match the unit scale. Make sure you select your armature and press “Ctrl + A” and apply the scale and rotation to the armature. Also, do this for the mesh itself.
The only export option that I changed in Blender is an option under “Armatures” called “Armature FBXNode Type.” I changed this value from “Null” to “Root”.
I now have a floppy pile of polygons whose physics asset I can modify to my heart’s content.