Why are my animations incorrect outside the preview window?

I’m having a strange issue with animations not showing up correctly.

I have a relatively terrible walk animation I’ve created in the Persona editor that shows up correctly when previewed:

When I view it in the Animation Montage editor, or the Animation Blueprint editor, however, it shows up like this:

This seems to happen with every animation I create from the animation editor; why would this be happening?

My animation is only 4 frames long and is running at 0.1 rate, but the same result happens with a rate of 1.

I tried exporting and importing the animation as a new asset and it caused a crash, which I’ve reported through the crash reporting tool. Fantastic!

After successfully reimporting the animation, the skeletal mesh is now tiny and showing the incorrect animation in the animation preview as well:

EDIT: Link is no longer available.

I imported the skeletal mesh + animation exported from UE4 into Blender and it produced a terrible abomination?
O8e0inM

It also has the same corrupt animation data.

Hi Lucien,

Any chance I can get a copy of the original fbx that you imported into the engine?

Here you go!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22777510/permanent/NAC-1.fbx

Are there any updates to the issue? I assume it’s an error on my end, but some users in the Unreal Engine IRC on Freenode had hinting that the UE4 animation creator/editor was still not production-ready.

Hey Lucien,

I have an email out to our devs to see if they know what’s wrong with this fbx. It appears to have some issues that I don’t have the Blender knowledge to advise you on.

The Additive Layer Tracks in the editor are really meant to add a new layer of motion to an existing animation. It is not meant for creating animation from scratch like you’re attempting to do. It is (and I hesitate to say this) “possible”, but it is lacking many of the useful animation tools that your 3D modeling software of choice provides to you. I wouldn’t say that it’s not production-ready though as it is not intended for animating characters from scratch. I would highly recommend animating in Blender and importing those into the engine.

On another note, Blender’s FBX importer doesn’t always agree with the FBX files that come from the editor. We are working with them to resolve some of these issues, but that’s an ongoing process.

EDIT: Concerning the character scale issues, I haven’t been able to reproduce that. If you’d like to continue trying to work this way, we can take a closer look at your UE4 Project.

Thanks for looking into that, I changed my workflow after reporting the issue to build the animations in Blender instead, which has worked out pretty well.

That’s great! Have you had any of those scale issues since implementing the new workflow?

Nope! Once I got my units set to centimeters in all my tooling and got export working correctly it all worked fine. I had some interesting issues with the forward vector being incorrect in the animation preview, but I imagine that’s also a tooling issue on my end.