Mesh imports but animation does not.
I have had problems with importing animation into Unreal 4. The importer seems very broken with a message about the skeleton not muching even though it really does match. If I import an animation from Maya LT 2016 into Unral the animation part cannot match the skeleton. If I do the same in Blender 4.77a same problem. Not that Maya did report the skeleton as having a couple of unsed bones. If I do a basic animation in Unreal on the same mesh and export it from Unreal 4.11 and import the animation in again via FBX still a problem. The FBX import seems to be a bit broken or the skeliton on the mesh is too complex. Is there anthing I could have done that is upsetting Unreal 4 is there a maximum number of bones that are allowed? Is there some ‘rule of thumb’ when animating and imprting that I just have not realised?
BTW If I do the most simplistic animation in Blender with a single cube and bone it does import.
Any clues? I have seen lots of similar posts across the internet saying about import issues present in Unreal 4 but not Unity. I realy want to stick with Unreal 4. I like the game design enviroment and concepts and have watched a number of tutorials but the animation thing is a bit of a problem!
Message in UE4 says ‘Does not contain any valid animation tasks.’
Are you exporting the mesh and rig together in the same fbx file?
Yes I have a mesh and an armature from Blender.
I have tried to import the same FBX file exported from Blender into Maya and that is fine and the animation is imported too. Just not into UE4.
Also if I import to Maya then export for UE4 the animation still does not work.
I think there is a bug because the importing with animation only works when the armature/rig in Blender 2.77a is called ‘Armature’ if it is called anything else it does not seem to work. But if that is Blender that has the issue or actually the import in Unreal 4 I am not 100% sure. I am using ASCII fbx expot to compare but the compare function on the text editor I was using crashed my computer so ‘Armature’ naming will have to be the workaround for now.
Hay only been looking at this for about a week before posting question doh!..
That is an interesting problem. I have never run into it before. Generally unreal will pick up the animations and assign them to the skeleton and it will match those animations to the skeletal mesh. So you can test that in the future if you only import the rig you should see the animation files with it. But if you only import the mesh it’ll import as a static mesh. When you bring them both in together it’ll read the msh as a skeletal and apply the animations to it. You can also retarget animations to a similar mesh.
I just had the same problem in 4.11. I used both ASCII and binary FBX (both did not import any animations). Can anyone confirm if this has been fixed in 4.12? I did not find it in the patch notes.
Update: The workaround does work for me. Mine are called “Armature” and now does import into UE4 with Blender 2.77a (Tested with ASCII fbx):
