Key Technical Issues
- Skin clipping through the shirt (especially shoulders and upper arms)
- Deformations increase when transferred from Maya to UE5
- Clothing not following the body correctly due to weight inconsistencies
- Missing or broken materials during import
When exporting animation from Maya to Unreal Engine 5, I frequently encountered problems with the Ramon rig during production. The character’s attire presented the largest difficulty since the body and shirt meshes have different weight behaviours despite being skinned to the same skeleton.
Importing the entire character rig with every layer of clothing into UE5 presented another significant issue. Sometimes the full mesh chain body, shirt, pants, and accessories arrived with faulty mesh binding, missing materials, or damaged texturing. Because the rig was nested inside a referred group at one point, UE5 was unable to identify the proper skeleton hierarchy.
which resulted in clothing stretching or detaching. The answer was to manually choose the necessary components of the hierarchy and export them as separate FBX files after experimenting with various export settings and troubleshooting tips. This preserved the proper weights and made sure that each piece of clothing joined cleanly to the skeleton once inside UE5.
Fixes Implemented
- Manually exporting mesh parts separately (body, clothing, accessories)
- Selecting the correct nodes in the rig hierarchy before exporting
- Rebinding clothing to the skeleton where necessary
- Testing animations in UE5 progressively instead of exporting everything at once
- Adjusting deformation curves in Maya to reduce clipping in key poses