Using the 4.8 skeleton for blender animations?

Development Character & Animation
1

I posted this on the Answerhub, not realizing that it was Memorial Day (Epic staff probably have the day off?).

Anyway, here’s what I want to do:

  1. Export the skeletal mesh from 4.8 as an FBX file.
  2. Import the FBX file into blender, remove any extra root bones and fix the hierarchy.
  3. Create a simple animation in blender and import it back into UE4, replacing the idle animation.

Here is the result from my current attempt:

44043-10.gif

44044-02.gif

Here is my blender file. Does anyone have experience doing this? It worked fine with 4.7, but this new grey guy is giving me trouble.

Thanks!

2

I have had some minor success with this in the last few days. I might be the only one who cares about this, but I’ll post my findings just in case this is helpful to someone out there. Sorry this is a bit tl;dr.

44780-01.gif

Taking the skeleton from UE4 into blender makes it somehow incompatible with the original. So making animations in blender and trying to take them back to into UE4 won’t work. I originally thought this was because the bone hierarchy changes when you import the skeletal mesh into blender, but even once I fixed the hierarchy, it still doesn’t work.

It’s possible that if you had the original skeletal mesh FBX file made by the Unreal team, you could import that into blender with no problems.

You can however just replace the skeletal mesh and animations. Here’s the blender file I made, with animations and export settings. The problem with that is the skeleton is 100x bigger than it needs to be and resizing it down causes errors in the editor. It still comes out normal size in the engine because I exported it with a scale of 1.00.

If you’re going to replace the skeletal mesh and animations anyway, you might as well just use the old rig they provided or my version that has IK bones added :smiley:

3

Seem to me that exporting from blender causes armature to rotate on wrong axis, probably mixed up Y with Z or sth.

4

With blender 2.75 works fine, and now no need that stupid scaling objects.

5

You don’t need scale the objects at export or what you say ?

6

Yes, in blender 2.75 no need scale at export and no need scale scene etc.

7

Its broken like before with export with scale, try to open the skeleton in UE4 and select a bone and try to rotate in the skeletal mesh editor…