i might have made a terrible mistake i am trying to solve now for several hours googling and testing and can’t find a solution to my problem.
I forgot to set the scale value inside blender to 0.01 and thus the animations i have done have now bone data that seem to be too small for Unreal to work. When i rotate a bone by like 90 degrees in the UE skeleton editor, it actually just rotates visually maybe about 1 degree.
Also i get the warning, that the bones are too small to create physics for it.
I tried to scale the mesh + armature in blender while changing the world scale but to no avail.
Also played around with the FBX export scale and also the UE4 import scale without any solution.
Applying the scale to the Armature also messes up my animation since blender does not recalculate the bone positions and keeps them unscaled. For example, moving a bone by 20 cm in blender pose mode will turn it to moving by 2 mm after applying the scale to the armature (Ctrl-a in object mode), so it makes all animations completely ruined.
As if the armature object scaling has no impact on the animation at all.
I store all my animations separated in Dope Sheet actions.
I really have no idea where to go from here but to re-rig the mesh and redo all the animations with the proper world scale being set. I have a model that has the proper scale and the import on that works so the mistake is most likely on the model’s end.
But before i go through this i thought i’d ask here if someone maybe has a solution without me redoing all this.
Is there some kind of magic trick or way to recalculate the bone positions after scaling the armature?
I guess something like that would do the trick.
I am not sure what this will do but you could in object mode select the mesh and hit ctrl a, then select set scale. It will revert the blender scale back to 1 and then you can try to re-export.
It’s a Bug since December in FBX / Blender that export that the skeleton get’s not scaled proportionally with the mesh and thus is becoming way too small for UE4 to handle correctly. That might be also the reason that transformations within the skeleton however his solution does not work for me. Scaling the skeleton by 100 and scaling down the mesh creates a mess in UE4 and also does not seem to fix the physic creation problem.
So for me it seems 40 hours of work turned to garbage and i a cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have the correct scales and scales applied to armature and meshes before anyone starts creating animations.
Epic might want to add this info in a red exclamation info box into their documentation. A lot of things messing up will start from there.
Maybe it will be fixed with upcoming versions of the export or blender.
Personally I have never encountered this issue. One problem with blender is the grid changes size depending on how far you zoom in or out. What I recommend to people before you begin modeling is to zoom all the way out. The prominent squares on the grid will be one blender unit or 1m. As you zoom in it will be broken into sub units. A good guide for making sure your models are proportionate to unreal is to export the 1m cube from the starter content into blender and go from there.