I know this is a year old now, but I tried some things with Mixamo and stumbled over the exact same problems (working with **Blender **here).
As I didn’t read every post, hopefully this has not been posted already and I didn’t do the typing for nothing ;D
There was a bunch of very weird results. Completely twisted bodies or the animation being locked at the pelvis resulting in a weird rotation of the whole animation…
I finally got it to work yesterday in a veeery inconvenient way. Basically I had to download with mesh from Mixamo, then import in Blender to find the mesh rotated by 90°… rotating it back allowed me to import it, but there where like 10 different animation layers where one of them was the correct animation.
TL;DR:
In this post, Arlyn pointed me towards this very helpful wiki entry.
So the way I got it to work without much work was:
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Export the mesh with skeleton from UE
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Import it in blender
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Reparent the Root Bone
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Delete the empty
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Export Mesh and Armature only with -Z Forward Y up (didn’t check if other setups work)
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Upload to Mixamo
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Animate (only have to do steps 4 - 6 for further animations)
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Download animations without skin (no mesh necessary, smaller files), both Root Motion and In Place should work
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Import the animation in UE without mesh and select the skeleton you previously exported (don’t reimport the skeleton)
Steps 1-3 only have to be done once, so once you have the skeleton reparented, you should be able to use Mixamo without having to do extra work.
I tested this with a Synty skeleton and retargeting it to another Synty skeleton worked too, so I don’t think it should pose any problems with other skeletons.
This is how the skeleton looked in Mixamo. The weird bones you see around are IK bones that I didn’t have to delete (they won’t be animated).
As the wiki entry suggests, the “empty” that we have to delete might cause the creation of a new root bone once you import it back. I guess this also causes problems with Mixamo (the rotations and such). Once that is gone, the animation data exported works fine without even having to reimport the skeleton.
Hope this helps some people!
Cheers
LordStuff