Send to Unreal

Skeletal Mesh

The tool infers an Unreal Skeletal Mesh asset based strictly on the content of your Export collection. Here is what it is doing:

overview

Note

The armature placed in the Export collection must be responsible for deformation, meaning only bones that are skinned to a mesh. No bones used for control schemes should be put in the Export collection.

1

The important thing to remember is that only armatures and meshes inside that collection can be used to build the data for the skeletal mesh export and import.

2

As you can see, a related mesh and armature combination results in an Unreal Skeletal Mesh asset being generated along with Materials, a Skeleton, and a Physics Asset. Also notice that the Skeletal Mesh name matches the mesh name in blender, as well as the skeleton and physics asset with _Skeleton and _PhysicsAsset post fixed respectively.

To run a strictly skeletal mesh import(meaning no animation will be exported), the animations import option must be turned off in your Importopen in new window settings.

3

LODs

LOD workflows for skeletal meshes are supported. Simply activate the LODs option in the LOD Settings group and Send to Unreal will handle exporting and importing each LOD.

4

There is a sub category for skeletal meshes that allows you to specify a path to a LOD Settings data asset in your Unreal project. This can be referenced directly to automatically set your skeletal mesh lod settings.

5

Note

If your mesh has a LOD naming scheme and Import LODs is true, the LOD postfix will get stripped out of the final asset name based on the lod regex. For example SK_Mannequin_LOD0 = SK_Mannequin

Also notice that the LOD build settings can be set under the Import > Editor Settings > Skeletal Mesh LOD Build Settings group.

6

Note

The Editor Settings corresponds to what is available in the EditorSkeletalMeshLibraryopen in new window in the Unreal Python API:

Only Mesh

To run a strictly mesh asset import (ex: excluding import of particle systems as groom assets), all import options must be turned off in your import settingsopen in new window except for Mesh.