Hello, all sorry for reawakenig this thread once more, but this is one of the earlier and better results for how to use the animations off the mixamo site.
I thought I’d let those that stumble upon this thread with an updated method for getting the animations working if you use 3DS Max that worked for me.
First of all, LordStuff’s post really helped me get the animations working with the new mixamo site.
Mostly follow his steps, but what blender sees as “empty” is actually a dummy by the name of the skeletal mesh you have to delete, it’s in the same spot as the ik roots and the bone roots, at 0,0,0. If you don’t delete it, the hips won’t animate (despite the preview on the mixamo site looking fine) and you won’t be able to target your existing skeleton for the import of the animation. Also, there’s no need to reparent the bone, 3ds max imports it correctly.
Now for a second important step. Depending on your units setup in 3ds max versus UE4 (if you just imported the skeleton into a new plain scene, you probably didn’t do any unit adjustments), your imported animations may be at a strange scale. In my case, the imported animation made the character 10 times bigger.
Luckily the amount you need to adjust is easy to find and fix without having to do the skeleton and export/import all over again.
If you find your animations at the wrong scale, select the root bone in the animation preview in UE4, it will actually tell you the scale of the bone compared to the default. Mine was at 10,10,10.
To fix this, just reimport the animation, but set a custom scale to import. In my case this meant 0.1,0.1,0,1. In order to make it result in a proper 1-1 scale.
I only have one last issue that I’m not too sure of how to fix. No root is no longer an option at the mixamo site. Meaning that the animations also animate root, which in my case I do not want.