Unreal supports importing sockets with FBX files, but this appears to be almost entirely broken. I don’t think it matters where the FBX file was generated from, as while I’m using Blender, I also saw a thread where Unreal wouldn’t import sockets from Houdini-generated FBX files. Even if you follow the naming convention exactly, Unreal just won’t import your sockets with your mesh, but there are workarounds.
- Socket importing is just broken with multi mesh import. You must enable “Combine Static Meshes” for them to be imported
- Unreal will never detect Empty/Null objects exported with the FBX file. You have to use something with geometry like a sphere mesh
- Even though Unreal recognizes your sphere mesh as a socket, it will still import the geometry and merge it with main object’s geometry. You can work around this by tabbing into edit mode, deleting all of your sphere’s geometry, and then exporting your geometryless mesh. This relegates you to only being able to select your sockets in Blender’s explorer & generates ignorable errors on Unreal import.
- Even though Unreal has an understanding of units/axis conversion it needs to do when importing, and does so on the actual mesh geometry, it does not do this for the sockets. Your sockets will come in at scale <100,100,100> and rotation <-90,0,0>. You have to set your socket’s scale to <0.01, 0.01, 0.01> in Blender (do not apply the scale) and add <90,0,0> to world rotation to get the socket to import at the correct scale/rotation
With this, your sockets should finally import correctly
