Trying to import a skeletal mesh, results in invalid bind pose error

So I’m very new to animation and hardly have a clue of what I’m doing. I just imported my skeletal mesh and I get an error saying that “FBX bind pose 'BIND_POSES” is invalid. It will be ignored".
When I later try to attach an animation to this skeleton It gets cut up into tiny pieces and doesn’t look right. I’ve exported the mesh from 3DS.

I’ve been trying to find help with this but I can’t really find any useful information.

Would love to get some help. Thanks in advance!
-Tom

Well as far as I know a bind pose error is one of those picky fussy error messages. I believe it’s you skin your model to the rig, move one of the bones of the rig and your mesh no longer matches the pose from the original bind.

The worst that I would expect to happen is in app X if for some reason you turn off or remove the skinning solution the model will pop back into it’s default pose prior to binding.

As for the outer stuff that can happen if your animations do not match your rig. Best practice make animations using the model you plan to use.

I see, thanks!
It worked fine when I used the mesh before I added the root joint, only problem I had was that the animation got flipped on it’s back without the root.
Do you have any idea how I can prevent it from flipping the animation without causing these other problems I’m having?

Thanks!

The flippy floppy part is an easy fix.

3ds 's default world space is “Z” up and UE4’s world space is “Y” up so to get the player model onto it’s feet you just need to set the world axis in FBX when exporting to “Y” up.

Adding a root bone will not correct for rotation, it’s a world space issue, but adding it is whats causing your second problem.

The rule is simple that the animations has to match the rigged model and is considered being absolute as part of the source chain. When exported as a complete package the hierarchy is recorded as both part of the mesh rig as well as the animation data set and the two “has” to match to ensure that any additional animations added will also match maintaining the source chain.

By adding the root bone you broke the chain as the animations do not contain information as to the added bone so to reestablish the chain you will either have to remove the bone to match the animations again or you will have to redo all of the animations to reestablish the chain.

The exception to this rule, which I understand UE4 does support, is the addition of a child bone that is not part of the parent child hierarchy.

Thanks for helping Frankie!

Now it doesn’t get flipped anymore but it still gets cut into pieces, even though I import the mesh, skeleton and animation from the same file (that doesn’t contain the root joint that screwed it up earlier).

Here is a picture of what it looks like:

If I set animation retarget of every bone to skeleton it looks correct but I’m not sure if I should do that?

Also, any idea why the mesh is 27k polys when it’s half of that in other applications?

Again, thanks a lot for helping.

Cheers!
-Tom

The problem is that your mesh is in the right size and your rigg is too small -> just scale up the rigg so that it has the same size. In blender I had to scale up the rigg first and then I had to click onto object-apply
https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?1587-Blender-to-UE4-Character-Problem

Thanks ! That’s definitely the problem.
I checked the mesh and it’s at 300% while the bones are at 100%.
Any idea how I can fix this in 3ds? A reset Xform doesn’t seem to work with the skin modifier.

The skin modifier is an absolute based on a value so there is no scale to reset. To reset the mesh you will have to remove the skin modifier, preform the reset, then reapply the modifier.

There are a couple of ways to save the weights and the one I use the most is by using the skin tools under utilities.

Extract skin data to mesh.
Remove skin modifier from your model.
Hit it with a Xform Reset.
Apply the skin modifier back onto the model and included only the bones from the original.
Select both models.
Import skin data from mesh
Click match by name and import the weights from the original.

Another trick that sometimes works is to make a clone of your model (needs to be unique), remove the skin modifier from the original, xform reset it, and drag and drop the skin modifier back onto the original from the clone.

As a though you could also try toggling “always deform” in the skin modifier off and on.

Oh sorry missed the question about polycount.

A polygon is a quad surface divided by a hidden edge so although you see what looks like a single face there are actually two triangles (tris) that makes up the polygon (quad) and the number you get as a count depends on what the application is counting. If quads then your count will in most cases be half the count as it would be in tris.

A video game engine will in most cases count tris as generally they can’t support polygons which is usually a propitiatory feature of a given application that works best with available tool sets for editing purposes.

Bottom line everything 3D is about triangles necessary to define surface area and volume.