Simple sphere rotation maya export

Hi

I’m having real problems with pivot points and exports from Maya to unreal. For example, I have some spheres parented to a cylinder, the cylinder rotates and the spheres rotate themselves, whilst parented to the cylinder’s rotation. How can this be so hard? Is there no simple way of exporting this and importing into unreal? The animation I import is completely wrong, the parented spheres have completely the wrong axes. Have I used the wrong settings or should i give up and use alembic?