Blender Importing: Model rotates 90 degrees around X axis?

Development Pipeline & Plugins
, , ,
1

Very odd indeed, I’m using the monkey head to test importing animations and meshes.
When the mesh was just the monkey head, with no armature or animations, it imports just fine into Unreal, properly oriented. The mesh in blender is oriented to face forward down the X axis, and up is along the Z axis.

This orientation does not change when I add the armature and extrude the top of the monkey head. However, with these changes the mesh and skeletal mesh import rotated 90 degrees on the X axis. Stranger still the animations we’re oriented correctly still.

Of course rotating the import back 90 degrees orients the mesh and skeletal mesh just fine, but then the animations are rotated 90 degrees off!

This is the .blend with just the monkey mesh Nothing to special, I changed the scaling to centimeters and the mesh is roughly 1m in size. All scaling, rotation and translation is applied so there should be no offsets, and indeed when just this mesh is imported there is no issue.

This is the .blend with the armature and animations Don’t mind the creepy skull proboscis, I just needed something to animate with a simple arm rig.

I use the ASCII FBX exporter with Default Take disabled and only the selected items for export. I’ve found changing the axes in the export options does nothing to affect orientation upon import.

So whats the deal with my work now importing rotated in some places but correctly oriented in other parts?

2

Hello,

I can’t seem to access your Dropbox files so I can’t give a certain answer. The one thing that I can say is when you import the file into UE4 there is a option called CONVERT SCENE make sure this is unchecked. Then you can experiment and get your settings right.

Otherwise you can have a look at a previous answer I gave down below.

3

Also make sure your model and bone scale in blender is 1. Sometimes as you edit your bones they get different scaling and rotation values. Eventough everthing looks and animates 100% in Blender if the bone rotation/scale is off Unreal imports it like that.

4

I’ll give this a shot when I get home. As for the dropbox files, I haven’t used dropbox before so I’ll look into making them public

Edit: I’m using Sharex, which gave me a link to the file on dropbox, but evidently that doesn’t make it public? Either way I went and made a link directly to the files. I updated their links in the question if you’d still like to view them.