Exporting models and animations from the game for use in Unreal Engine.

Does the intermediate conversion to the hkx format play an important role here, or can I try exporting them to SMD after applying "Assume Skin Pose" to the skeleton and animations?
Also, I wanted to ask if you know of an optimal way to fix the movement in animations so that the model doesn't move forward but stays in place?

1) I couldn't get it to work with SMD; there are probably other ways to fix the export from Archangel. I just used the plugins I knew by trial and error, and it worked with the hkx format.
2) I can't think of a good way to stop the movement in the animation, but I definitely encountered such functionality either in a third-party plugin/script or in HavokPcXsContentTools_2010-2-0. For batch processing, I would try using the internal scripting language of 3ds Max.