I don’t really care about the artifacts, but I do mind the fact that my mesh was completely twisted
The issue I was having with the run anim seemed fixed in your screenshot, how’d you do it?
Right, the reason for the issues with the twisting is something I’ve outlined in one of the previous posts I referenced.
Like had mentioned, there’s quite a few idiosyncrasies with how the export from Blender is done. Most of those issues can be cleared up using very specific export settings and very specific import settings on the engine. The issue with the twisted bones is something I’m not entirely sure is the fault of Blender. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.
The twisted bone issues comes from a bug somewhere in the workflow where the bone in the animation must have delta transforms during the animation. Plainly, the bone “must” be animated. If the bone is at position (0,0,0) and rotation (0,0,0) throughout the animation, then what will likely happen is that the child bones will for whatever reason default to the position of the parent bone. Similarly, if the bone is at (1,1,1) location and (.1,.1,.1) rotation throughout the entire animation, the issue also occurs since, while the position and rotation are not at the origin, they also don’t animate (change values during animation). To fix it, the parent bone must have some animation, a change in value. Additionally, there’s an additional issue where animating one trouble bone can cause the issue to cascade down the chain to further children. If say the root bone has no animation, the thigh bones may default to the root location. Fix that, and another issue may show up, like the spine was never animated so the shoulders may default to the spine location or rotation. The issue goes even further as it can occur per channel. You could make sure that the bone has rotation on the X and Y axes, but if the Z axis is not animated, its child bones may inherit the z rotation of the parent. I’ve outlined the occurrences here in my own experience.
One solution is to simply key a location and rotational so that there is at least one translation and rotation delta in the animation for EVERY SINGLE BONE (important). Something small like .0001 is enough. For simple rigs, you can simply do it by hand, but you may want to write a script to help out once you get more complicated rigs going. The other official solution is to use the ASCII 6.1 fbx format as outlined in the Answerhub post I made from Epic support.
I consider Epic’s official answer to be untenable since the 6.1 fbx format is deprecated as far as I know and won’t be supported. Additionally, the 7.4 format supports blendshapes from Blender export which is useful for facial animations.
Thank you very much! Makes me wonder why the idle anim works fine, if that’s the case (given how pretty much all the other bones are idle)
I’ll keep this post bookmarked for future use. Thank you very much once more.
Right, I’m not too certain of all the cases where this issue arises, but I’ve on occasion before figuring out a fix had some animations be completely fine even though many bones had no changes in value. Perplexing is that you could key an animation of the rest pose and the rest pose animation will be correct. Animate one bone and everything can break or be ok.
Honestly contemplating switching away from Blender. It’s a great tool, but its 3rd party support is just awful. A shame indeed
Thank you very much. Here’s hoping something will be done about it in the future