There has no response on here, Unreal Slackers, or the Unreal subreddit, so here’s what I’ve found…
TLDR: I had to go into the FBX, separate the meshes, and center them by hand. The Mel script (for Maya) TheMunky101 posted here helped speed up the process: Center all selected objects and batch export them as individual files, Mel Script : Maya
The import process for Unreal is jank. There’s at least 2 ways (that have different, i.e. non-overlapping settings) to do it)
Method 1: Drag and drop into the content browser. It’s intuitive, but doesn’t seem to deal with FBX’s with multiple meshes well. When you import it, it’ll separate the FBX by mesh so each mesh gets its own file. BUT, if you touch the import settings of a mesh, it will turn it back into multiple meshes from the original FBX.
Method 2: There’s a button that you can click called “Import Into Level”. It handles multiple meshes well (it makes an FBX scene import data file…which I’m surprised the other method doesn’t) ,but there’s no import settings for transforms
and if you go into the individual mesh and try to change the import transforms, it gets overridden so nothing happens
In the end, the asset packs I was trying to import had FBX’s with multiple meshes and needed me to rotate each mesh. Because of the issues with each method, it was impossible to resolve it except by going into the FBX and separating them by hand.