Animations in UE4 belong to one armature, and one armature only. In Blender, you can have an animation belong to different meshes. As meshes and armatures aren’t inherently related in Blender, you can have two meshes per armature. Because that isn’t the case in Unreal, it’s defaulting to making a copy of the armature, one for the swords and one for the character. Because animations belong to one armature, you have two copies of the animation.
It’s a good idea to have the swords as a different object (you should have them as a separate mesh), so you have two options to fix the animation problem:
- Trigger both animations at the same time using two different blueprint nodes or lines of code.
- (this is the preferred way) Add attachment points to your character armature, convert the swords to static meshes, and attach them to the attachment points.
I hope this helps!