Solution for properly exporting UE4 animations into Blender and back

Hello everyone, first time posting here.

I’m really new to UE4 and I’m still just messing around, when I tried to export the third person running animation to edit it in blender, I noticed there are some issues. The telltale sign that there was something wrong was the “dislocated” left shoulder and wrong geometry on the right forearm.

I tried looking for a solution in the internet, but there wasn’t anything on how can you solve these issues.
I decided to mess around with the export and import settings in hopes that I will find a solution and I actually did!

So here’s a pipeline that worked out for me, note that I’m really new to UE4 and I have no idea if won’t create some new troubles.

  1. When exporting the animation from UE4 use the “Preview Mesh” export option (IMPORTANT!) This what prevents the dislocated shoulder and such

  2. When importing the FBX with the animation into blender check the “Automatic bone orientation” in the armature tab. It orients the bones so the skeleton looks a bit better, its not perfect at all, but it’s better than nothing.

  3. Export edited animation from blender into fbx (default settings worked fine for me).

  4. When you import the edited animation back into UE4 make sure to:

And that is is it. I found the UE4 import settings in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpzKsZzLjXw

Again, I need to point out that I do not know if it can cause some other issues, but things seemed to work pretty well.

I hope this info will help!

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You sir, you’re a hero.