Send2UE - Root wrong renaming when exporting with combine child meshes

[eatmylazer]

I'm here to submit the bug that is still present in the addon, that make things quite annoying/time consuming.

Bug: For skeletal meshes only, the root name is adding a "_002" inside the character skeletal mesh hierarchy when exported while using the "combine child meshes" feature. Any object with multiple child objects gets a "NameOfTheArmature+_002" inside Unreal Engine.

This issue was already noticed at this thread: https://github.com/EpicGames/BlenderTools/issues/436

It's not yet fixed on the latest version 2.0.2.

You can reproduce this bug by using any file. Just to be sure this bug wasn't on my end and indeed a bug, I've used the .blend file provided by james-baber, provided here: https://github.com/EpicGames/BlenderTools/blob/master/tests/test_files/blender_files/mannequins.blend

Here is the result with the option checked:

And here is the option with child meshes off, exporting normally like you see here:

No other option was tweaked once so ever in the in the Epic .blend file. No changes to scene and object scale.

This is a bug that is present in send2ue as far as I can remember. It's a shame we need to merge everything together beforehand, it makes the whole child merging for SK meshes useless and only viable to Static Meshes.

The only workaround I've found for fixing this is manually sending it to Maya and removing the "_002" by hand, re-importing it to unreal later. Kinda defeats the whole purpose though.

I'm using Blender version 3.2.0 and UE5 Version 5.0.2.

Hopefully this gets fixed soon! Thanks

[eatmylazer]

Also, aparently it doesn't matter if the mesh does have or not additional meshes. Checking the box will alone will make the renaming happen, as you can see by the test I've just made with the female model (which has no LODs, single mesh)

[james-baber]

Thanks for the detailed report. Ill take a look when I can

[eatmylazer]

Thanks for the detailed report. Ill take a look when I can

Much appreciated! This is the only bug that is making me having trouble importing characters to unreal. Since we can't rename the bones inside the engine, it's a pain to get the naming properly set while trying to keep all the character parts separated

[cremeSalade]

I have the same problem! For now the workaround I have is to merge every child, uncheck merge child mesh and add a root bone named "root" before export. After that I revert everything. It's kinda frustrating, but it works for now!

[james-baber]

@eatmylazer @cremeSalade the latest release moved this logic into an extension and fixed the root name issue. Reopen if this doesn't resolve the issue.

[cremeSalade]

Amazing! I just tested it, it's working! I'll just have to put everything in collections with the immediate parent collection name option. Thanks a lot!

[eatmylazer]

@eatmylazer @cremeSalade the latest release moved this logic into an extension and fixed the root name issue. Reopen if this doesn't resolve the issue.

I'll test it right now. Since @cremeSalade said it is working it should be fine. Today I'll take a closer look and report it back to you! Thank you so much, this is a thing that really need fixing

[eatmylazer]

@james-baber

It works just fine for simple models, but I'm not managing to get my character imported at all. It breaks halfway through and the mesh becomes a mess.

This is the error I'm getting in the Blender console Pannel.

This is the mesh that I have

And this is how the mesh end up being imported

Edit: After some testing, it seems that we can't have any object parented to one another when using combine meshes. All parenting must be cleared and only having the Armature as the parent of the objects. I'll test it further later and if I can replicate this further in other models I'll report the bug file.

@james-baber, is there a way for me to keep contact with you?

[james-baber]

@eatmylazer the first error message your seeing is because of the RPC timeout. The default timeout is 60 secs. Since your asset has more poly/bones it is probably needs to be bumped to a higher timeout since it is taking longer to import.

As far a the weird meshes, its hard to tell without seeing the state of the asset in blender, but usually I see this happen when automatically scale bones is turned on and some of the armatures bones are constrained. The tool has so be able to freely scale the bones to fix the scaling issues. A validation should probably be added to detect constraints, and prevent the user from exporting.

As far as children of armature children being joined, if you make another issue for that, we can make sure those are included if the unreal FBX importer will join them.