UE to Rigify - Problems Importing Animations

Development Character & Animation
1

Hello everyone. I’m having trouble importing animations made with the UE to Rigify workflow. This is where I’m at. I’ve made a character in Blender, created a simple armature for it, and used UE to Rigify to create the animation rig following the steps presented in the video. The rig seems to work fine in creating animations inside Blender. The character is exported correctly to UE with the skeleton and the base mesh. I’ve even successfully remapped the Mannequin animations to it. But I just can’t get new animations imported correctly inside blender. They are all imported with a still character. I can’t use “Send to Unreal” plugin, like in the videos, because it is crashing my editor. I’ve tried exporting the FBX with regular actions, NLA strips and nothing works. Any ideas??

2

Just an update. I’ve finally manage to get “send to unreal” working. I had a missing “/” in the start of my path name. Manual FBX import never worked for me when animating thru the IKs, but now the animations are updated correctly using “send to unreal”

3

mmh… i dont know if helps, but when you export the character do it without the rigify. With the bake animation, export only the rig and mesh (if you like), select Only Deform Bones (dont select leaft bones) , and if you want morph target dont select aply modifiers. I can export fbx and import into unreal without problems or extra bones doing this way

4

Thanks! This was really helpful.

A few other undocumented gotchas which took me a while to figure out:

  1. You want to export your skeleton in your T-Pose or A-Pose, not in the first frame of your animation. In Blender, export the armature in the “rest” position. If you use the first frame, you may get some unexpected bone deformations and slight offsets (my face rig was offset by 1-2cm which created a flat top head shape). Make sure you export both the mesh and the armature.

  2. When you want to export your animation, select your rig, select the “Object Data Properties” tab, switch it over into pose mode. Export with a different FBX file name. Make sure you export both the mesh and the armature.

  3. When you import your FBX files into UE4, first import your skeleton in the rest pose to establish your base skeleton. Then, import the animation from step 2. You should see the skeleton from step 1 populate in the import window for your animation. This two part import process ensures that there isn’t any mesh deformation caused by the first frame in the animation pose.