Hello, I’ve been learning blender for a bit now, and I’ve been working on a drone project which I have rigged now with a custom armature I made from scratch, I applied scale and all and I tried sending it to Unreal.
this is what I have so far, as you can see it has some animations too, I tried baking them into a game rig made with an addon I saw in a tutorial, and then sent to unreal using another addon with the same tutorial, the addons are game rig and send to unreal. The first issue I had was a scale error that said I needed to apply scale but whenever I did that it broke all positions of my mesh for some reason, so I applied it and re link everything and made every animation from scratch again(If anyone knows if I could have avoided this someone please tell me).
Now I don’t get the error and I was able to send it to unreal, but when I throw it into the scene, it seems all messed up.
I hope someone can help me, please, I’ve been struggling with this for days. I can send the file so you can check yourself what’s wrong, and please teach me how to do this properly.
I have never used that plugin to export from Blender to Unreal, but I can show you how I do it without plugins.
When exporting from Blender an .fbx first check that in “Transform” tab, in “Apply Scalings” is set to FBX Unit Scale.
By default is set to “All Local” and this is why a lot of people has problems of scale with Blender .fbx
And last in “Armature” tab uncheck the “Add Leaf Bones”
By default Blender generates a “last bone” in each eending bone of the armature.
Unchecking this options prevents that.
Now, in Unreal, you need to import the model 2 times.
First import a .fbx with only the model, without animations. And in Unreal check that it has imported well. It should have generated a Static Mesh and a Skeletal Mesh.
And last import a .fbx with the animation of the model.
When you import it uncheck “import Mesh” (because you already has imported, now you only want the animation) and then, in “Skeleton”, select the Skeletal Mesh that Unreal generates before.
That should make everything work okay.
Let me know how it went!
Hi there,
It seems all meshes are not parented to a main mesh, similarly to the car rigging, where you have Chassis as the top-level mesh, and everything else is parented to it. Objects that will move with a left door should be parented to it. The same logic applies to the bones in your rig. However, if you are using a rig, you don’t need to break the mesh into several parts, because you can have a single mesh split into several vertex groups (edit mode).
Also, if you are not making animations in Blender, you don’t need skeleton rig in Blender for rigid bodies. At least, not for a vehicle. All you need is to set the meshes with proper pivot points and parented one to another forming a mesh hierarchy. Unreal Engine will rig automatically for you if you import as Skeletal Mesh.
Thank you very much for the replies, I will try these things, I do have animations made though, but I will definely experiment with both, like I said I really want to learn to do this, So I appreciate your answers, I’ll keep you updated!
First of all, to be sure, if you create a default box in the Blender scene it has a normal size, right? just to confirm that the mesh in Blender is not very tiny.
But then is another option to import to Unreal that can be uncheck.
When you import the mesh .fbx to Unreal if sometimes it cames with a different scale I recommend to check “Convert Scene Unit”
Usually I always leave it activated, but by default it is deactivated.
And no, the first .fbx import should have the Mesh and the Bones, just delete the animation. And the second one should have the Mesh, the Bones and the Animation. Of which, in Unreal, we only import the animation.
Let’s see how it looks the mesh when you import it and it is in a correct size, maybe your material problem will be fixed!
these are my settings in unreal, also I’m not sure where to delete the animations, unreal or blender?
Do I have to export the same fbx, just unticking the mesh property and ticking animation? Sorry for so many questions
Might you have a video I could watch?
Now I tried another thing and I got this
This might be too much to ask but If I could add you in discord or somewhere and share screen that would be great.
You need to make 2 .fbx, I mean, export 2 .fbx, not to rewrite the original.
In Blender (or 3D software) delete the animation and export a .fbx (And I recommend you to save a file without animation)
In Blender (or 3D software) Ctrl + Z and export again another .fbx with the animation (And I recommend you to save another file with the animation)
The logic behind this is that most of the times you want more than just 1 animation for each character. So, first, you need to import the Character, for Unreal to have the Mesh, the Bones, the Materials and Textures. And you can change it as you like.
And after you import another .fbx that has the animation of that character.
In terms of files it would be something like:
Character_Base.fbx Character_Animation.fbx
Those strange errors are because you may have imported something wrong.
I found this tutorial from the community that can help you. Is for Unreal 4, but it’s the same in Unreal 5.
Sorry I don’t have a Discord, but don’t worry what you want to do is not difficult, it is just normal that the first time it feels a bit complicated
Hello again, sorry for taking so long to show you my progress (some life stuff) anyway, I get that error now when trying to import the animation only and in this video I don’t think he shows how to import an animation to an existing mesh inside unreal. Again I hope this isn’t being too annoying
Hi there,
This error happens if you select the wrong skeleton in the import options panel.
You need to make sure both skeletons match.
Can you please show the skeleton in the engine and the one in Blender? Below are the typical export settings. Make sure to select only the objects you want to export and check “selected objects”
Hi there, I can’t download the files.
My guess is that your animations are coming in with a different skeleton. So, can you please share the skeleton hierarchy of your animations? To do that, uncheck skeleton in the import options, that will duplicate skeleton, mesh and animation:
Hello, thanks for being patient, that’s actually the same video series I’ve been fallowing and he uses a blender addon to export from blender to Unreal.
I think this is the hierarchy that you are asking for?
1: Set the unit scale to 0.01
2: Set the mesh scale to 100
3: Slelect the mesh and press ctrl+A , select appy all transforms, the scale will be restored to 1.0
4: save fbx and import to unreal
Hi there,
No problem. That is correct, I wanted to see the bone hierarchy of your base drone imported with the drone mesh, and the skeleton that is imported with animations. To do that, you need to import animation leaving the skeleton empty, that will create another skeleton and mesh.
Perhaps the import error is being caused by differences in the hierarchy. Can you do that?
