Few months ago I tried doing skeletal animations in blender and exporting them to UE4 as FBX, ended up with all kinds of twisted mutants and messed up axis orientations.
Then I found that If you use Blender’s 6.1 ASCII FBX exporter then animations are fine but it adds an extra bone before the root bone for no reason.
Example :if your model is skinned to a Armature object named “human” which has root bone “pelvis” then after exporting FBX the root bone will become “human” and the “pelivs” bone and the rest of the skeleton will be its child.
I do not understand why is that root bone added when it was obviously not in the skeleton nor is it skinned to anything? this prevents from doing root motion animation and designing vehicles whose weight is calculated from root bone influenced geometry
On the other hand, using any other exporter (i.e FBX Binary exporter) causes deformation of mesh into a mess and all the axes for bones get disoriented.
So what is the proper procedure to import an animation from blender to UE4 with original skeleton? is it even possible to use blender to make animation for UE4?
I heard epic donated a large amount of money to blender foundation , lets hope it improves.
This was some time ago. The improvements are already in Blenders FBX exporter as far as I know. And to be honest, the FBS exporter has already been improved a lot!!
There’s a line of code in Blender. You need to comment it out, if I get a chance I’ll search for it, but there’s a post here with instructions. The post is just VERY old so you have to search for it. You comment out that one line and you’ll never get the extra root bone.