How to Export & Import Animations From Blender to Unreal Engine 5
Written by David Stenfors
Technical Requirements
For this guide I am using:
Blender version 4.0.2
Later versions will also work, but these are the minimum requirements.
Introduction
This guide assumes that you already have basic Blender knowledge, and are familiar with creating keyframe animations, I won’t go into any details on how to create animations, only the export and import process.
If you want to learn how to create FPS animations in Blender, I would recommend checking out our free YouTube tutorial series, you can find it here:
It’s based on the same rig as the one used for this guide, so you should be able to follow along without any issues!
I will be using our assault rifle model for demonstration purposes, but this process will work for any of our rigged gun models that include the Blender source files.
Blender
Exporting Character Animations From Blender
The process for this is pretty straightforward, first we need to match the timeline start and end frame with the duration of the animation that we wish to export, then select the armature in Object Mode, and export it as an FBX file.
Here is how to do it step by step:
Set the Timeline Range
Open the Blender file containing the animation that you wish to export, for demonstration purposes I have created a short fire animation that looks like this:
The fire animation is 24 frames long (starts at 1, and ends at 25), so I will set the timeline range in the bottom right corner to 1-25.
Select the Character Armature
Switch to Object Mode, and select the character armature.
We only want to export the animation data, so no need to export the mesh. The armature is set up to work with the default UE5 Manny skeleton, which is available to import directly in Unreal Engine.
Export the Character Animation
With the armature selected, go to File > Export > FBX (.fbx).
This will bring up the FBX export settings, these are the settings that I use:
Give it an appropriate name and choose a folder destination, and then press Export FBX.
Exporting Gun Animations From Blender
The character and weapon rig are two separate objects, this means that we have to export their animations separately.
Select the Gun Armature
Just like we did for the character armature, we also have to select the gun armature while in Object Mode.
You might notice that the gun armature name ends with “.001”, this is because the armature of the character and gun have the same name, so blender automatically adds the numbers at the end to differentiate them.
This should not cause any issues when exporting, but might be good to be aware of.
Center the Gun Armature in the Viewport
The gun armature is currently attached to the gun bone of the character armature, while we could technically export it from this position I usually prefer to have it centered in the viewport first. If it’s not centered before exporting we will get a warning message when importing the animations into Unreal Engine
This is the warning message in Unreal Engine when importing a non zeroed animation:
What the log means:
Source Global Transform:
This is the global position, rotation, and scale of the Root bone in Blender before export (positioned at the gun bone of the character armature).
(-6.129862, 13.500997, 151.916324 | 22.640712, -29.344927, -46.547862 | 1.000000, 1.000000, 1.000000)
Converted Global Transform:
This is what Unreal Engine converted the Root bone's transform into after import.
(-0.000002, 0.000008, -0.000002 | 0.000000, 0.000001, 0.000001 | 1.000000, 1.000000, 1.000000)
Basically Unreal will automatically zero out the location and rotation of the imported animation root when it detects offsets (to match it with the gun skeleton that is already imported to the project), so to avoid this we can simply center the gun armature in Blender before exporting.
With the gun armature selected in Object Mode, go to the Constraints panel on the right side of the screen.
The gun is attached to the characters gun bone, called “ik_hand_gun”.
We can simply uncheck the blue “eye” icon to temporarily disable it.
Export the Gun Animation
Now that the guns armature is centered in the viewport, we can export the animation.
Make sure that the correct animation is assigned in the Action Editor (the fire animation in this case).
Go to File > Export > FBX (.fbx).
Give it an appropriate name and locate the folder that you wish to export it to, and press Export FBX.
Now we have two exported fbx files, one for the character animation and one for the gun.
Unreal Engine 5
Importing Character Animations
Now we can import the animations to our Unreal Engine 5 project, I will be using the default assault rifle model project, which already contains the gun skeleton (armature) and its textured meshes.
Import the UE5 Manny Skeleton & Mesh
Before we import the character animation, we need to make sure that our project contains the UE5 Manny Skeleton, otherwise there will be nothing to assign our animation to.
Right click anywhere inside the folder area and choose Add Feature or Content Pack.
Select the Third Person template, and choose Add to Project.
This will create three new folders:
Characters (contains the mannequin meshes and skeleton)
LevelPrototyping (this one is not necessary for this guide, and can be deleted)
ThirdPerson (this one can also be deleted)
Go to Characters > Mannequins > Meshes, here you will find the UE5 Manny skeleton, as well as the character meshes.
Import the Custom Animation
Now we can import our custom character animation, right click anywhere inside the folder area and choose Import to /Game/Characters/Mannequins/Meshes (doesn’t have to be this exact folder path, feel free to import it elsewhere).
Locate the character animation that we exported previously, and import it.
This will bring up the FBX Import Options window, here we need to assign the SK_Mannequin (UE5 Manny) as the Skeleton.
We can leave the settings as default, and then press Import.
This will import our custom character animation into the folder.
Import Custom FPP Manny Mesh
Since this animation was created for a first person perspective, we want to import a version of the Manny mesh that only contains the arms.
This is already included with the Blender source files, you can find it inside the source files folder, under Meshes > Manny > SK_FPP_Manny_Simple.
Import the “SK_FPP_Manny_Simple” mesh using the same method as before.
In the Import settings, we want to set SK_Mannequin as the Skeleton (the thumbnail might show a different preview mesh, but this can be ignored since it’s just a visual bug).
Press import, now we have a custom FPP version of the Manny mesh in our folder.
By default it won’t have any materials assigned, we can open it and assign the same materials as the default mannequin mesh uses.
Change the Preview Mesh
If we preview our custom animation we notice that it shows the third person Manny mesh by default.
To fix this, we can change the Preview Mesh to the custom FPP version that we just imported, and then press Apply To Asset.
Now we can properly preview our animation, this is what the imported fire animation looks like:
Fixing Camera/Head Bone Jitter (Optional)
For this demonstration I didn’t animate the head bone of the character, but in case you did, you might notice that there are sometimes issues where the head bone shakes/vibrates at the end of the animation.
I’ve noticed that this usually happens when there are small/detailed rotations in the animation, which can be very frustrating to fix.
The best solution is to enable Preserve Local Transform in the Unreal Engine animation settings, and then re-import the animation, this should fix the issue.
Importing Gun Animations
The process for importing the custom gun animation is pretty much the same as the character, since we already have the gun skeleton in the project (”SKEL_AssaultRifle” in this case) we can import the animation directly.
Import the Custom Gun Animation
Right click anywhere inside the folder area and choose Import to.
Locate the gun animation that we exported from Blender earlier, and import it.
Again, the skeleton preview thumbnail is messed up, but that’s fine, just make sure it’s assigned to the correct skeleton (”SKEL_AssaultRifle” in this case).
Import the animation.
Preview the Animation
We can now preview it (since we assigned it to the gun skeleton, the preview mesh should already be correctly assigned by default), this is how it looks:
And that’s the entire process for exporting and importing custom animations from Blender to Unreal Engine 5 using our source files, hope you found it useful!
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