UE4 freezes when importing FBX with animation

Here’s my setup :

I have a fully rigged character with corrective shapes in Maya. I’ll create several animations for it.
I exported a first fbx with the full character (with rig, blendshapes, materials, …) and I will export a separate fbx for each animation.
In Unreal, in can import the full character fbx correctly, with all its blendshapes and rig. I do have some import errors though, I’m not sure if they do have an impact on my issue :

But when I try to import an animation (I only have an ugly test anim for now) it just freezes right after I click the “Import” button in the import options dialog:

My import settings for the full character fbx:

And for the animation fbx:

You can see I use option so that I import only the animation while reusing the already imported character. I also tried to import the full character with its animation, but it freezes the same way.

As for my FBX export workflow, I used what’s described in [that video][5]. I use FBX binary 2018 version as I’ve seen some UE doc indicating that version. But I’ve seen also plenty other docs or even forum topics advising versions 2016/2017/2014. So… I’m not sure what to do from that.

[Here’s an archive file with my fbx files][6].

Thanks for any help.

I’m getting somewhere!
I achieved to import without freeze. For that, I had to use the File > Game Exporter menu. Obviously, he’s doing a lot of stuff when exporting, and it works.
Except for one thing:

My character’s face is all messed up. After some digging, I discovered it’s all about morphers having insane values:

If I manually put all those insane values to 0, everything looks fine. What could cause this? I can’t possibly spend time resetting those morphers values on every animation I need to make every time I import them.

Sometimes the hard way is actually the simplest way.

I couldn’t have anything working using Game Exporter or using plugins, so I made myself a script for baking my animation including my corrective morphs and exported the result in FBX 2018. It works.

So here’s how I made up my script:

First I selected my export selection set (it contains my geometry and deforming joints), then clicked Key > Bake Simulation (you have to be in Animation set menu to have the key menu displayed). I open the script editor and copy the command line starting by “bakeResults” (it’s easy to find it if you have selected plenty of things just before: it’s a massively long line at the end of the script editor).

From there I have my script base, but it doesn’t include the baking of my blend shapes.

So, for each object with blend shapes to bake:

  • select the object in the outliner
  • double click its blend shape input in the channel box
  • copy its name
  • paste it at the end of the script, just before the };
  • make sure to respect the syntax: each list element must be between two " and separated with a comma and space . No comma nor space after the last element before };

It looks something like this:

bakeResults -simulation true -t "1:60" -sampleBy 1 -oversamplingRate 1 -disableImplicitControl true -preserveOutsideKeys true -sparseAnimCurveBake false -removeBakedAttributeFromLayer false -removeBakedAnimFromLayer false -bakeOnOverrideLayer false -minimizeRotation true -controlPoints false -shape true {"element_to_bake", "another_thing_to_bake"};

But with much more elements in the list.

Notice the -t "1:60" in the line: it’s the frame range you want to bake. You will need to adapt those numbers to your needs.
Once you have this line, I recommend you save it in a file somewhere.

To use it, SAVE YOUR PROJECT BEFORE BAKING, then paste the script in the MEL command line at the bottom left corner of the UI, adapt the time range if needed, then press ⏎ ENTER to execute the baking script.
When the baking is finished, you can export your FBX and then reload your saved project file.