A quirk in naming conventions led me to this odd situation upon importing a Skeletal Mesh with animation from 3ds Max to Unreal Engine. Some of my bones were missing their animations in Unreal yet there was no error message when importing and the FBX seemed to be fine. If I imported the FBX back into Max it worked as expected so there wasn't an error in the FBX itself. The problem I found was that some of my bones had an asterisk in their names. I know, generally bad practice at all levels of animation work. It was something I had done in the file a long time ago without much thought that came back to haunt me. So... Max will export the animation, bones and mesh just fine as a single FBX to import into Unreal. Unreal will import the FBX file without any complaints. But any of the bones with the asterisk in the name will not have animation on them. AND wherever they are in the hierarchy, all bones below them will also have no animation.
Keeping in mind that using special characters is a no-no when naming things in your 3D content creation package, I will note that the asterisk is part of the ASCII standard set so maybe not too egregious a foul on my part. Still, this took me many hours to nail down without an error or log to consult. Maybe a bit of useful information to stock away in your memory banks.
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