Exporting fluid animation and importing into Unreal Engine

#1

Hello, sorry if this is the wrong place to post but it seemed the most relevant.

I’m having difficulties exporting my animation into an FBX file. All i get is a static mesh every time no animation!

I’m hoping to export my animation and import into Unreal engine as part of a project I’m working on as I want to present all of my models/animations within the gaming engine.

I have some fluid dynamics exported from RealFlow as a mesh and I have textured them in Maya. I can’t even get the animation with no textures to export let alone with textures.

I’ve tried baking the keys several times . But all i get is a static grey mesh. After reading through forums all evening, I’ve finally given up and would very much appreciate some help from anyone.

#2

Realflow “animations” are not the same as animations of a skinned character.
They consist of one unique mesh for every frame of the animation.

To my knowledge there is no game-engine that can load such caches - primarily because the amounts of data required is way to big to load or stream in a realtime game.

At our company we’ve created a system that can import alembic caches for playback in the game, but even there we skip heterogenous meshes, like meshes fluid surfaces etc.

I’m sure there are ways to hack this, but it wouldn’t be something you’d do in a real production - at least for the next couple of years.

Why do you want to show a realflow cache in a game engine anyway?

#3

Hello, thanks for your reply.

It’s an animation of a waterfall, I just wanted it to simulate within Unreal engine so when the game plays the water actually moves. but by the sounds of it the way I wanted it to work is not the way to do it.

#4

Yea these kinds of thing would typically be done layering sheets of deforming geometry with scrolling textures on them or by using particles.
So you’re probably best off using Unreal’s particle system.

#5

I’ve been trying to play with fluid in UE4 and wonder the same thing since I know Maya. I have came across vector fields. You can export as FGA and import easily. I can only wrap my brain around static export as of the moment, but there is an option to export as a sequence. I have to play with it a bit though. Download the MAYA exporter here. Or here if you want to see what you click on… https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B83CdEunIwihSW5aSW1nMGpmZnM/view?usp=sharing