UE4 Splitting Blender animation FBX into 3 separate files? (have video)

So I made a character that has 2 swords apart of his skele/mesh. In animation, the sword in his left hand his scaled down in the first frame and scales up to regular size through the rest of the animation (you will see in video).

For some reason when i import it to UE, its shows up as 3 different files. 2 of them i show in the video, which it looks like one he is moving is arms properly, but the swords are frozen. The second he his frozen but the scaled-up sword moves.

It literally separated the swords and the mesh’s animation to 2 files

Whats causing this? Have you seen it before? any known fixes?

Or is it Blender altogether and not caused by UE?

Any answer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

EXAMPLE VIDEO

I haven’t seen it before, but could probably fix it. Can you reply to this with a download of your .blend, because it’s probably a problem in Blender. (I promise I won’t use it for monetary gain)

yeah of course. Thanks for replying

link text

Animations in UE4 belong to one armature, and one armature only. In Blender, you can have an animation belong to different meshes. As meshes and armatures aren’t inherently related in Blender, you can have two meshes per armature. Because that isn’t the case in Unreal, it’s defaulting to making a copy of the armature, one for the swords and one for the character. Because animations belong to one armature, you have two copies of the animation.

It’s a good idea to have the swords as a different object (you should have them as a separate mesh), so you have two options to fix the animation problem:

  1. Trigger both animations at the same time using two different blueprint nodes or lines of code.
  2. (this is the preferred way) Add attachment points to your character armature, convert the swords to static meshes, and attach them to the attachment points.

I hope this helps!

Ok i think I see what you’re saying with that. One last thing though. When you import Twin Blast from Paragon into unreal, his guns import in with his mesh, theyre like a part of his mesh. YOu can see them on the ground between his feet. And there are a couple anims where the guns scale out of his arms to normal size like im trrying to do with the swords. How did they do that? Im basically trying to rig my character the way they rigged Twin Blast

I’m not sure how they implemented that, but if you make dedicated weapon bones in your character armature you set your attachments to, you can animate them however you want.

Ok thanks.