Blender animation to ue4 - weird rotation

I’m trying to figure out how to reliably get animation into the unreal engine. It hasn’t been a smooth ride so far (22 hours and counting). I’m hung up on rotation issues. I’ve managed to work around(not solved but bleurg for another day) most issues but this one is just being problematic.

Here’s a short video that demonstrate’s the problem.


My question is: how can I make it not do that?

Thanks,
Robert.

:frowning: what other avenues for support do I have?

Hi Robert,

I was looking into this the other day and have forwarded this issue on to one of our Devs who has a lot more Blender experience than I do.

For issues like this, our forums are also a great resource. There are a lot of really helpful community members who have Blender experience and are actively developing with it. If there is some ambiguity about whether something is a setup issue or an actual bug, it can be good to post on the forums as well.

We try to respond to any bug reports quickly, but we have had a large influx of new users and answerhub posts since we went free. Thank you for your patience and I’ll keep you up to date about any responses from the dev.

Hey Robert,

I spoke with Kevin Vassey and we’re definitely seeing some issues. He’s going to put some more work into it. For now though, I’d like to point you to this forum post from one of our twitch streams a couple of months ago. Included there is the .blend file for the Third Person Skeletal mesh as well as the recommended export settings. However, when we went in to mess with the mesh in blender, we realized a few problems with it. Kevin is going to try and fix the kinks and we may update that example file.

I’d definitely recommend watching the streams from the youtube links in that forum thread as well.

Hello, thank you very much for responding, I appreciate it.

Hmm yes, I can see how going free would drastically increase the amount of beginner UE4 developers asking questions.

I actually used the twitch streams as the basis for working on this animation stuff, but I didn’t use the blend file because this tends to happen:

I will take your advice and repost this issue on the forums.

Can I get an estimate on when I can expect an update from “the dev”?

Thanks again for responding.

Hey Ironsoul,

I’m curious how you ended up using the export settings that you are using in your video. They don’t match the recommended settings.

When you did try using the blend file, were you trying to export animations from the blend file and import them onto the existing ThirdPersonSkeleton in the editor? Or did you export/import a fresh skeletal mesh and from the blend file?

Unfortunately we don’t have any kind of estimate to give.

Hey,

When I used the recommended settings, I would end up with an import roughly equivalent to the (official provided) blend file (albeit with the root bone not set up for some reason which I have to manually fix), animating and importing into the existing ThirdPersonSkeleton ends up with this: GIF | Gfycat

but importing and exporting with my different settings gives me an almost proper export aside from the hand rotated wrong.

If I make a new asset, the blend file works mostly(but only for that new ) but I still end up with the occasional weird rotation(usually the left foot, sometimes the left hand) anyway, if you’d like I can record a quick video showing what happens when I make a new , although the result is very similar to what I’ve already shown.

To expand further, the main settings that I changed is the bone orientation orderientation, i found that I have to use x and y both import and export in order to get a (kind of) consistent asset flow from ue4 to blender back to ue4, if those differ then the bones get messed up. I chose x and y because it gives the least distorted bone orientation inside blender, although it’s still pretty weird.

P.S. I realize that game engines are really really complex and have a lot of moving parts, so this is just me trying to help make sure that blender is as supported as it can be.

Hey Robert,

Importing the new was where we saw the foot rotation that you mentioned and some other issues. That’s part of what Kevin is looking into.

Also we completely appreciate when people report these issues. Too often it seems that issues aren’t reported, so we are very grateful for the feedback.

Hey Ironsoul,

I’m marking this as answered for tracking purposes, but I’ll keep you updated on any developments.

Ok, have there been any developments yet? I’ll have to recheck with blender 2.74 to see if anything has improved from their end.

Unfortunately nothing concrete yet. I’m sorry about the delay in response, but there have been email threads going back and forth on this subject.