Thanks again for verifying what I'm seeing. I really love working in IClone, so I hope they put some focus on cleaning up the exports as little. Anyhow, thanks for walking with me down this windy road, I def appreciate it.

As an aside, do you see anyany jitter in feet that have been locked by a reach effector and exported as FBX?

Definitely, Baking Constraints is not exactly a perfect routine either. This is true for exporting to FBX, or saving as Motion+. You only get almost 100% with Reach Effectors inside iClone.

Ok, thank you so much for verifying. That really helps me.

I would say no, this is not a desired behavior - as it also creates the exact same jittery animation inside UE. It is possible I may have stumbled onto a bug. There are situations where you might want the root to follow the hip, but not in every case - and I suspect the 'turn if off' button under the advanced panel is not working and is always exporting as ON, locking the root to the hip no matter the setting. I'm chatting with support, hopefully they have a fix/solution. Again, thanks for helping me with this - knowing it is just not me is a relief.

As an aside, do you see any jitter in feet that have been locked by a reach effector and exported as FBX? I have tried baking the effectors in the Edit Motion Layers panel as well as not baking them - and while in IClone the feet are rock-solid, in any exported FBX (including Blender) there is still a very slight jitter to them. Nothing as bad as the first issue I was talking about, but definitely noticeable.

Yes, that is how it *should* works I suppose. Again I do not have UE, but exporting with UE settings adds UE IK resulting root bone movement by X when importing back to 3DX > iClone and adding a lot of jitter by X in a way.
There are a lot of UE pros who should be able to help with importing UE motions and exporting it back. Anyone?

Unfortunately I can't post the particular animation that started this all as it is copyrighted (bought from 3rd party). But for me the animation is actually irrelevant, I can see this behavior on any animation.

What do you see if you export your test animation with the FBX UE preset and compare it to FBX Blender preset? For me it is night and day. With UE the base of the root bone floats around, with Blender the base of the root bone is locked to 0,0,0.

That is why I asked to have that motion shared. In iClone I could have confirmed jittery root in Curve Editor.

No offense if you want to bail on this thread 4u2ges, but I thought I'd just update what I discovered. The issues appears associated with the UE FBX export preset.

Actually, after more testing - this is not UE-centric. I see same thing on any default Iclone Character too. I load in a basic preset character, make some animation that tests for the behaviour (locked feet and hip bone moving around) and export FBX. Open that in Blender etc and I see the problem. This has me deeply confused, doing a fresh install and will look again tomorrow.

Nope, I do not have anything checked in advanced settings.
Maybe you can share the motion from UE as well as 3DX profile for it (so that we do not have to spend time mapping bones).
And someone would look at it.

Ok, thanks a million. I can see from your Blender screenshot that the root bone appears to be at 0,0,0. Am I right to assume it remains locked in that location during any hip bone animation?  I'm seeing the same problem in any program I bring the FBXs into. UE, C4D, etc. My root bone is floating around.

I am happy to see that it can work, but I have to say I'm confused as to what is going on for me. I don't own the curves plugin, but I can't imagine that not having that could be the issue. I have put in a support ticket. Think I'll do a reinstall and see if that gets me anywhere.

Also, on your FBX advanced export settings, did you uncheck "Reset Motion Root" to get your 'non-floaty' version?