Easy Fix for Unreal to Blender Rig Bones Orientation

So I was dealing with this problem just now. Your first import is actually "correct", this was confusing at first but made sense eventually. since head/tail don't really exist outside of blender the bones have the correct orientation as it is in the skeletal mesh you exported from your unreal project. Blender however also needs to place the head somewhere, so it gets weird like that. So my solution is simple, select all bones in pose mode and set a custom shape ( like a cube ). No more ugly oriented bones but at least you can create animations compatible with your unreal build. You can add simple IK constraints and additional non deforming bones for the elbow/knee poles.
If you mess with the orientation your new animation will mess up the mesh in Unreal!

I don't use FBX, if you export from unreal as glb(gltf) make sure to set the "bone dir" to "blender" which preserves the original orientation just like your first import and keeps compatibility with your skeletal mesh.

Thanks dude!

Thank you thought it was going to be a long day fixing this.

I can't find a solution for the failed to merge bone error, anyone have an idea?

doesnt work unreal 5?

This is not available in Blender 3.2 though :(

THANK U SO SO MUCH
THIS WAS REALLY REALLY REALLY HELPFUL
THANKS AGAIN

Thank you sooooo much. I was losing it trying to find an answer.

I totally understand that blender is a free software and we should not nag about those things so much, but they have updated blender so many times, why didn't fix this problem ? is it that hard to fix throw an update where we can just import skeletons with no problems just like Maya or ZBrush ? hope they fix this cause im so used to blender and i cant just jump to a new software and go throw the process of learning again

Great info, just difficult to hear you, mumbling, perhaps audio issue, otherwise great info.

You are my savior. Thank you so much!

Good tip!!

what about the damn feet

The problem comes when someone imported the armature and sent you a blender file with no possibility of re-importing and you end up with all the bones looking elsewhere.

dude thanks for the simple tutorial this is always annoying

Bro you just save my life…question? How do you move to character to the positioning of the rig in order to parent them?

Hey @Kade awesome videos and starting music! good luck on this!

My problem is I wanna import dead by daylight characters or any character for the most part and when I click import and go to fbx or xps it pulls up my files but everything is blank. Why?

Thank you so fucking much!

Hello, the keys in the armature part do not appear for me, what can I do?

It still looks different than the original skeleton, at least in the foot

How do you undo this for exporting back to UE4? cozz when i use this it messes thign sup in UE4

I've been animating for a studio and I ran into this same issue. What I did was import the original rig as is, and then use the Automatic orientation to import a "Control Rig". I would modify each of the original rig's bone's transforms to follow that of the control rig (Local Orientation) and then animate. I would then export the original rig's as a fbx and import that into Unreal. It works great. Do be warned though- it's a tedious setup and may require a beefy computer to handle. It also results in a few other issues that I have yet to resolve that are semi-managable. But it does let you use the original rig without having to retarget every animation in Unreal.

yeah it does not work really, but it is very good to understand what the heck is going on. Especially because in unreal the bones highlight as if youre selecting the father instead. So this makes harder to identfy what you need to edit. importing like this help a lot to understand where the bones actually are.

Love watching this!!! You really need P R O M O S M!!!

I mean this is fine but be careful. Using automatic bone orientation will break compatibility with the original skeleton and leave you with more problems than you started with having to retarget all animations that come with it. So unless you are an animator or know what you are doing (and i hate to nit pick) this isn't really a an "Easy Fix" at all.

If you want to maintain compatibility you create controls to indirectly manipulate those bones without editing them.