Problem importing LOD for skeletal mesh from blender

Hi everyone. I have problem with my skeletal mesh done in Blender. I did bones in 0.01 scale and mesh in 1. Here are my export settings:

Up to this moment everything was fine. Animations, morph targets and physics asset works great. Problem occured when I imported my LOD1 version of mesh, which looked in ue4 like one big mess:

However when I remove small amouts of loops from base mesh and export as LOD1 it looks fine after importing, so I ended up removing verts in small portions and checking if it still look ok in UE4, which isn’t a good workflow and takes much more time. Sometimes when I import LOD mesh engine crashes. Once after crash I reopened my project and imported again the same fbx file and it looked like it should, so it seemes to me like problem is in engine. Do anyone have a solution for this situation or maybe I’m doing something wrong?

Have you tried importing it as a static mesh and have unreal generate the LODs automatically - does that work? How did you generate the LODs: in Blender via the decimate modifier, Collapse, Un-Subdivide or Planar? You should try all three, see if one makes a difference over the others. You might also want to check the “Apply Modifiers” checkbox in Blender on export & see if that helps.

Thank You for your reply! Actually I was removing verts manually. Decimate modifier does good work in all three modes (for me best in collapse mode) and everything looks great after importing. Only problem I have with that is now I’m loosing my morph targets, because I need to apply modifiers. I guess I should make my morph targets in every LOD separetly from scratch? Still learning proper workflow.

Glad to hear decimate is working out for you! I remember I was surprised too when I first saw how effective it was. Re. morph targets, I’m afraid I can’t really help you there, but what I’d suggest is to save the model into a separate file (call it LOD1), select all vertices in edit mode & triangulate the whole thing via Ctrl+T with Quad Method set to Fixed Alternate. Afterwards, run the decimate modifier on it (w/ planar in your case), APPLY the modifier along with any other modifiers you might have on your mesh, then export as FBX, making sure to UNCHECK the Apply Modifiers checkbox. If you hover over the checbox it will even say that leaving it on prevents exporting shape keys.

Thats why I have Apply Modifiers unchecked on my screeneshot :slight_smile: In Blender I can’t apply modifiers to my mesh, when I have shape keys on it. Only thing that comes up to my mind is to separate verts with shape keys, remove some verts manually, apply decimate modifier to the rest of the mesh and join them again. Luckly I don’t have much of those.

Yeah, that might be the only option. Have a look at the last answer on this thread: How to preserve shape keys with decimate modifier? - Blender Stack Exchange

My idea doesn’t work. In blender is ok, but after importing to UE4 morph targets are messed up even if I’m not modifying verts with shape keys. I’ll try to add shape keys to my LODs from scratch. Hope this will work. Thanks for your help.