I’ve made a very simple character and a skeleton for it in Blender and there it works great. Then when I try to import it in UE4 it can only import the mesh and if I want to import the ‘skeleton’ I need to select one I already uploaded, so it’s actually an animation according to UE4. I cleared all keyframes and did all I could, but I can’t find a solution to make it import the skeleton and the mesh. The way I rigged it in Blender was having all moving parts seperate and making them follow the bones by selecting bone instead of automatic weight. This might have something to do with it. I hope someone can help me with this, since I finally have a character that is rigged nicely, but it won’t import.
I don’t know Blender really but from your description it sound like you did not “Skin” your mesh and that is a requirement for a skeletal mesh in UE4. So this is the reason why when you import UE4 thinks it’s an animation. If the model parts are supposed to be rigid, then you still need to skin them, and it should be all one mesh, unless you plan to do interchangeable parts. But you can skin the model rigid, meaning no blended weights on the verts between any bones, each mesh part is 100% weighted to one bone. Like in the case of a robot, for example.
So if you have your mesh, and it is correctly skinned to the bones, when you import to UE4, you will get a skeletal mesh and a skeleton. When you import any animations, you will then pick your new skeleton as target for the animations.