Blender Export : Skeletal Mesh Problems (Bounds & Blend Shapes)

Hey there… I have two problems when I try to import my animated Blender-Character into UE4:

  1. My Bounding Box (“Bounds”) is way to big

BoundingBox.jpg

  1. My Blend Shapes (/Morph Targets) make the model morph into a weird pose. They deform the right portion of the body, but I think in addition the mesh deforms into an upright walk pose, which should be handled by the bones-animation, not the Blend Shapes.

BlendShapes.jpg

If it helps, here are my Export/Import-Settings:

http://www.saschawachter.de/files/ExportImport.jpg

Help would be greatly appreciated.

So no one encountered this problems yet?

Hey Adrenaline… thanks for your answer.

First to the bounding box Problem. It was a scale issue I guess. Once I scaled up my mesh AND applied Scale in Blender, the Physics asset and therefore the bounding box worked correctly.
Now I have to re-do all my animations. This is gonna take long, but if that is the price… ok. So remember to APPLY (Ctrl + A) all transformations to Mesh and Armature before animating.

After that and with the export/import-settings below the Morph Target Problem seems to be gone. But if it ever occurs again, I am going to try your method. Thanks again!

Hi, this is late but I think I figured out the morph problem!

In blender, if the pose the character has upon export is different from whatever Unreal Engine decides is the default, all the morph targets/blend targets will include that pose! To fix, just set the Blender pose to whatever UE4 thinks is the default, save and export to FBX, and the morph targets will look normal.

(To check for this bug, open the skeletal mesh file in UE4 and apply several morph targets; if the model stretches further and further with each morph, this is the problem).

Yes, you can scale on export. I tried that and it made the model bigger… but the bounding box problem did persist. Now I scale it correctly in blender and the export scale value is on 1.00 not 100 :wink:

If I just scale the mesh and armature, it doesen’t screw up the animations. But the bounding box problem is only solved by “applying” the transformations, which has nothing to do with modifiers btw. …
I don’t know exactly what it does… but I think it can be understood as “baking” or reseting all the transformations to the mesh/armature. See this for details:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Fade/Doc:2.6/Manual/3D_interaction/Transform_Control/Reset_Object_Transformations

Actually you can scale on export to FBX, the option is at the top of that FBX export dialogue you screenshotted. Just set it to 100.

Even if you had to scale in blender, it shouldn’t screw up all your animations if you just scale the root bone…?

Also I don’t understand the comment about apply transformations, I have a model here with many modifiers and the “apply modifiers on export” button checkmarked in your screenshot keeps that from being an issue. So confused…