I’ve been having a heck of a time learning the basics of bones and animations. I seem to be getting the hang of it outside of UE4 but nothing seems to be importing nicely.
I am importing a very simple mesh skinned to a bone system with 3ds Max. I am then taking mocap data and re-targeting it in WebAnimate. Things look great in WebAnimate and I was hoping exporting/importing would be a breeze but I’ve spent all of yesterday fiddling with options and hierarchies to try and get things to work.
I have applied a skin modifier to all of the geometry. I don’t really care about deformation so each poly only has one bone. That means there are bones that aren’t directly attached to polygons.
Here is the model in Max. It’s really simple and I just want to get the workflow down.
Here is the Hierarchy in Max. I am not sure if the meshes need to be children of bones or can simply be skinned. They are currently children of the root I tried removing the mesh from the root but UE4 really didn’t like that.
Here are my export settings
Now In UE4
My skeleton directly imported from Max looks a bit off. I could be wrong but it looks like the mesh is being treated like bones. For example, I have highlighted the Char_FootLeft “bone” in the image below which should just be a mesh. Is this because of my hierarchy? Why does UE4 think the mesh is bone?
When I import the animation, I get one of two errors. I’ve tried exporting with seemingly all permutations of WebAnimate’s settings. The first is “Failed to merge bones” and something about me changing bone hierarchy… I’ve tried to let UE4 sort it out by pressing “yes to all” but that doesn’t fix it.
The second import error I get is “failed to find any bone hierarchy. Try disabling the “Import as skeletal” option to import as rigid mesh”. Disabling “import as skeletal” does not fix this issue.
For what it’s worth I am including a screenshot of WebAnimate, the rigging and export settings I’m using.
I am linking to my character fbx and animation fbx files to this thread to see if someone can spot something wrong. The animation fbx was exported directly from WebAnimate and the Character fbx was exported from Max.
[Character FBX][6]
[Animation FBX][7]
Thank you so much in advance!! I wish I didn’t need to write this essay but I don’t know where the issue originates from.