Severe issue with reimporting mesh and skeletons built in the unreal editor.

Development Character & Animation
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1

Just encountered a pretty irritating problem when creating a skeleton in Unreal 5.7.3.

  1. I imported my character mesh from blender (just geometry, no bones).
  2. converted the imported static mesh to skeletal mesh which created a skeleton asset with it
  3. spent several hours rebuilding the same hierarchy as the Unreal 5 Manny skeleton by hand.
  4. noticed the character was not exactly symmetrical (one arm was slightly off) so I fixed that in blender
    5 then pressed reimport mesh
    6 then everything breaks.

Now the skeletal mesh only shows one standard root bone in the skeleton tree and fails to recognize the attached skeleton with the bone hierarchy I built.

And to make it worse it appears skeletons are glued to a specific skeletal mesh and I have not found a way to salvage this problem.

Is there any way to fix this in Unreal?