Blender to Unreal Engine 5: Character Rigging & Animation Export Guide
Learn how to export skeletal rigs and NLA animation tracks from Blender into Unreal Engine 5 without scale anomalies or broken bone hierarchies.
Transferring character rigs and skeletal animations from Blender to Unreal Engine 5 can trigger bone axis misalignment or leaf bone clutter if unit scales and export flags are misconfigured.
1. Armature Hierarchy and Root Bone Setup
Unreal Engine requires a clean single Root bone at position 0,0,0. Ensure your Blender armature has its root bone unparented from non-deforming control shapes. Set scene units to Metric with a Unit Scale of 0.01 to match UE5's centimeter scale seamlessly.
2. Disabling Leaf Bones in FBX Exporter
In Blender's FBX export menu, under the Armature tab, uncheck Add Leaf Bones. Leaving this enabled appends extra dummy bones to the end of every bone chain, which bloats VRAM and interferes with UE5 Control Rig IK solvers.
3. Exporting NLA Action Strips & Root Motion
Push animation clips to Blender’s Non-Linear Animation (NLA) editor as distinct Action tracks. During FBX export, check Bake Animation and NLA Strips to import multiple character animations (Walk, Run, Idle) into Unreal Engine 5 in a single FBX file.