I think that ideasman42 was talking about blender bug tracker here -> https://developer.blender.org/maniphest/project/2/type/Bug/
Thanks for the link, will take a closer look at it but it seems that I have hit some other issue. All my bones are having proper Translation Retargeting in UE4 (at least that’s what UE4 is showing), and my character was not imported into Blender, but created from scratch. So there must be some other reason for these twisted/corrupted bones.
Yeah, you are probably right. I am so fixed on the UE4 end of the project right now that I didn’t really think of it 
I will post a Blender bug after the planned testing and will cross-link it with the UE4 answerhub. It will make much more sense to post a bug report with some more double checked info.
Thx for the info. So whats your workflow, do you apply scale and rotation on the armature? Do you rotate the mesh -180?
Edit: I looks like i had to apply scale and rotation and that fixed the bending of the body of the character, but the animation skel is still too small, anyone know how to fix that?
If it’s like 100 times to small than simply scale it 100 times in Blender. The Scale setting of the .fbx importer used to work (set to 100) but it doesn’t anymore for me. That’s one of the things I am investigating at the moment, but right now, as a workaround, I am simply making my character 100 times bigger.
Thx, gonna try that.
just noticed the imported char is bended when imported with pose position, but with rest position is not, so how to solve that?
I am having problems with corrupted animation data as well, and I will be testing it in the next few days.
Nope, that didnt helped and still appending the mesh and armature into a premade setup blend scene(the UE4 units) from which i successfully exported a mesh with armature did not help too with the small bone size!
This is the same set of issues I am trying to solve as well (I’ve read everything I can find on the subject, and watched all tutorials/podcasts on the subject), if I can help in any way let me know. After extensive testing, here’s what I still can’t do, and I don’t think is possible with the current Blender FBX exporters…
If you want to attach something simple with no deformation, like a hat, to a character, you just add a socket and then attach your mesh to the socket, no problems there. However, if you want to add something (that is removable and easily re-usable on multiple characters) and more complicated, like pants, a jacket, an intricate suit of armor, etc., then you won’t be using socketing. What you will do, is use “add body part” on the mesh of your original character. In order for “add body part” to work, you need to have your imported jack/suit of armor/etc. imported using the existing skeleton. Now we can do this if all of the assets are created (or re-created) from scratch with-in blender, however UE4 has a standard Mannequin that is used for selling and using animations/bipedal characters on the UE4 marketplace. Currently, there is no way to make 100% UE4 Standard Mannequin compatible items using Blender. All we can do is hack, and work around and break compatibility and get something working and quite usable for our own projects, but long term, I really want full access without breaking compatibility.
TLDR: Currently, we cannot take the default UE4 Standard Mannequin, into blender and then make a new mesh for it (character or clothing) and re-export it without breaking compatibility with the original Standard Mannequin. We can use re-targeting workaround for our own project and not care about breaking compatibility but this isn’t a perfect/long term solution.
Note: UE4 specifically uses FBX version 2014.2.1 for it’s system. Blender uses both a new version and an older version, but not that version. The SDK and python bindings for the specific version UE4 uses is here: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?siteID=123112&id=23298047
I’m willing to help troubleshoot in any way I can. For a temporary solution, I would personally be quite happy with a separate Blender FBX addon made with the above SDK even if it were an add-on to Blender that could not be included with it’s release, just so that us content creators can get back to work until there is a fully FOSS solution in place without bugs and breaks. Also, I will be donating to the Blender Foundation in the next few months, and this is my number 1 wish at the moment with every other request being trivial.
However I can help, let me know. Going to go test a nightly build today to see if anything has changed.
As a side note, here is what I can do without any problems. I can: Import a custom skeleton,skin,mesh,animations without too much difficulty. I do need to use the (make sure to have a slight key on every bone trick to make sure rotations don’t go haywire) and I don’t seem to have any issues with exporting static meshes for props. I can also successfully animate on the Standard UE4 Mannequin, export to Unreal as a new skeleton, and then in the animation browser, I can make a copy of those (making sure to show incompatible skeletons) and then retarget and send a copy of my new animations to the existing Standard UE4 Man and after that step is working and saved I can delete the temporary incompatible imports (skeleton, animation, etc.) The result is a working animation with full compatibility with the Standard UE4 Mannequin assets. So yeah, the only thing we can’t do, without a work-around, is making a full skin weighted character or a clothing asset that is fully compatible, but the above trick with re-targeting will get us compatible animation.
Sorry for the long post, let me know what more I can do to help.
I did some more tests with the .fbx animations (still having some twisted bones problems) and posted the info on the UE4 answerhub: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/187729/bug-report-blender-fbx-animations-problem.html
If anyone is having some other experiences with this issue it will probably be a good idea to post it there.
Hi Cancer
I have run through your post again and I co not fully understand what you mean by this part: I do need to use the (make sure to have a slight key on every bone trick to make sure rotations don’t go haywire)
It looks like this could be somehow connected to the issue I am having right now, but I am missing some information here
Still not ‘fixed’ but you will find a simple workaround here: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/187729/bug-report-blender-fbx-animations-problem.html
Has it been reported?
You might want to check latest buildbot builds (https://builder.blender.org/download), just fixed T41719, and this may also address other similar issues.
Thank you for all of the hard work Mont, it’s well appreciated.