Blender -> UE4 animation glitch

Development Character & Animation
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1

I created an animation for my character in Blender and after exporting it to ue4 here’s what happens with his foot:

I assume it goes to T-pose position at frame 0.

I’ve spent hours trying to find a solution for this and just nothing works. This things has been around for ages and I still don’t know what causes it.

2

The behaviour of the foot is a bit strange for sure. Is this the first animation you’ve tried to export from Blender for this model?

The single-frame glitch of the foot looks to me like the sort of behaviour I get if I haven’t animated something quite right within Blender, so I wonder if the problem is in Blender or exporting from Blender rather than within Unreal. A few things on the Blender side that I’d try if I was trying to solve this problem would be:

  • Most obvious thing to do (I presume you’ve already tried this…): if you scroll through the animation in Blender frame by frame, does the foot behave properly?

  • Are the bones of the left foot keyframed at the start / end of the animation? (If the keyframes of the left foot are on the second frame of the animation rather than the first for some reason that could give you a glitch like this if you have other keyframed poses outside of what you’re exporting.)

  • Are you sure the start/end frames in Blender are set correctly? (If you are accidentally exporting an extra frame that could give you a 1-frame glitch.)

  • Does adding extra keyframes for the foot just before and after the start, or just before and after the end of the animation solve the problem?

These are all kind-of “obvious” suggestions… presumably none of them help?

This things has been around for ages and I still don’t know what causes it.

I’m not sure quite what you mean here - are you saying that you’ve had this problem with other models in the past?

3

Hey,

  • I fixed the issue although I’m
    still not sure what caused it. I
    imported/exported it a billion times
    while clicking all the things. It
    seems like it was something with
    actions/NLA stripes (whatever that
    is) in Blender and/or some import
    settings in ue4.
  • I haven’t touched the legs of the
    character while doing the
    animation. At all.
  • Therfore legs behaved correctly in
    Blender.
  • Start/end frames were set correctly.
  • Adding extra keyframes at start/end
    did not fix the problem.

And what I meant by that sentence you quoted was that I created this mesh few months ago and when I tried animating it back then I had same exact issue and I never fixed it until now. I had to skip the first frame manually in ue4, which is a lousy workaround.