Since 4.16 Unreal removed the redundant Armature node from fbx files if they contain an object called armature, those models show up much larger in the re-targeting editor than they actually are which makes it impossible to re-target those models to anything. This scale change can be observed too, if one tries to show the poses in the re-targeting manager of the model.
Repo:
export the default 2x2 cube from blender with scene setting metric 0.01 with an skinned armature as its parent, once imported into unreal place it in the scene and observe the correct scaling of 2x2 meters. Now check the right click re-target editor and there should be no cube visible and in the re-target manager of the model observe the scale change when showing pose.
this should be fixed please because the only work around right now is to go back to 4.15 and hack the blender exporter to remove the Amature node and then migrate the model and skeleton to 4.17!
this bug happens with any blender 2.7x version even the latest 2.79 which has some options to apply scale to the armature but those do not help sadly.
nope sadly it is still happening in 4.17.2 but i have not upgraded or tested this in 4.18 yet. So only going back to 4.15 doing the retarget and then migrating that asset back to 4.17 works atm. Could be that it is not happening in 4.18 but i have not tried this yet.
this only applies to cases where you already have an animation blueprint in the correct scale, but if you were to set it up from scratch you would run into the issue i described above. - once setup it is possible to rexport new animations and so on execpt root motions which is where your work around has to be used to get them working.
Did you by chance have any delta scale applied in Blender? If, for example, you had an armature scale of 1.0, but a delta scale of 0.5, the model once imported into UE4 (after removal of the extra root bone) would appear twice as large. If not, then it’s a bug that should be addressed.
No transform and delta scale are 1. This issue simply stems from the problem if the importer of the fbx removes the amarture root object without transffering the correct scene scale to the contained root bone the scaling just defaults to some random scale.(in my tests it wasnt even a power of 10 scale, i think that it takes the maximum dimension of the bounds an defaults those to 100 and everything just gets way to large.- the scene scale written in the fbx on export gets lost somehow…when importet in 4.16 and above.
What results do you get when actually retargeting? Does the final skeletal mesh get too large? Or have you noticed this behavior only in the display of the retargeting manager?
well the retargeted skeleton mesh is broken because the mesh did not match in the retargeting editor so it is way too big.
The scale offset in the editor is not just being displayed wrong but actually broken when retargeted
Here are my Blender FBX export and UE4 import settings, if this might help at all. I would recommend creating a new blank project with two different skeletal mesh cubes, each share the same skeleton structure, but the first one is twice as large. Make sure both have their scale applied in Blender before exporting. Import both of the FBX files into UE4.
Make a copy of this project and pack it as a .zip file using 7zip. If bigger than 5.2 MB, upload the .zip file to a safe file sharing site (like Google Drive) and paste the link here. Now Epic staff will be able to test to see if when retargeting the large one to the small one, the small one comes out bigger than it should.
Blender 2.7x - 2.79 to UE 4.7 - 4.18 works well if you set scene to metric with unit scale of 0.01 - including retargetting. Did this already hundrets of times and still works well in current versions. In newer versions even if you include a “Armature” bone. Either delete the “root” bone in Blender and call the armature “root” or call the armature “Armature” and let UE4 remove it. It’s very important that everything (armature, mesh, …) got scale applied before you export. If it’s not visible in the retarget manager then usually one of the exported objects got scale. Attachded a screenshot that shows a ManuelBastioni lab mesh created in Blender 2.79. I renamed the armature to “Armature” and scaled everything 100x and applied scale to everything before export (to UE 4.18). Retargetting works just well:
did you retarget to the mannequin? If this what you did then it works in 4.18 again. except if your target and source is from blender then there is no issue.- i might test it over the weekend if i get to it.
Upper left is thirdperson jump / default manequin - right one is based on marked-place anims. I imported almost in every version since 4.7 … not sure if I did in 4.17 but it works well in 4.18. Pretty sure some part (mesh or bones) are scaled if it causes issues.
