Hello everyone,
i made a quick Character-Model in Houdini, with a basic Rig and Animation. FBX export to unreal works for the Animation, but the Normals of the lowPoly char get smoothed and i dont want that.
When i import the Character to Unreal just as a Static Mesh, everything is shown as inteted, but importing as Skeletal Mesh brings the smoothing every time.

I tested a lot, played with export and import Values and spend some significant time in the Forums looking for a Solution, but no luck so far.
Is it maybe something with the deformations through bones or capture?

Any help appriciated.

I found your post because I was running into the same issue. I ended up solving it so I wanted to share the solution here for future web searchers

I tried a few things so I'm not 100% sure if all these are needed but what I did was added a normal sop that adds normals to vertex then did the capture rigging & deform sop and on the deform sop I unchecked “Deform Normals” Then in Unreal make sure to tell it to import the normals when you import the skeletal mesh FBX.



Hope this helps someone!