Maya to Unreal (character animation) - Help

#1

Hey everyone.

I’ve tried many times unsuccessfully to export animated characters from Maya to Unreal and never with any luck.
Mind you - my purpose is to use feature-quality rigs (not gaming rigs) in Maya and move them to Unreal in order to skip the rendering. (Unreal is capable of producing some really convincing Arch Viz environments these days)… and I personally think that having the ability of changing camera angles on the fly and rethinking focal points without the need to re-render would be amazing.

BUT - so far - no luck. I’ve tried with rigs from Animation Mentor (I’m a former student), iAnimate (same), Longwinter Studios, etc… and i haven’t found anything that even comes remotely close to working. I’ve tried exporting the mesh, then the skeleton with and without constrains, then the whole scene, then just the animated skeleton and reassign in Unreal, (all via fbx)… tried also (in desperation) to use the “export to Unreal” menu option in Maya 2018, and it pretty much never works.

SO… help! Without having to model and rig my own characters (which is unlikely to happen since I know nothing about rigging, and I’m not there when it comes to organic modeling) - what advice/ tutorials/ etc do you have?

AND if there is anyone here who knows someone from Digital Dimensions (who did just what I’m describing for their TV series named ZAFARI) - I would love a contact in order to pick their brain about this. It’s been 6 months… and I still can’t get the thing to work.

Sincerely
Sleepless in PA. =)

#2

Try using the Bake Animation option in FBX, there may be some rigging that can’t translate to UE4 but you can still bake the animation you have in Maya

#3

Thanks Darthviper107

Trying to bake and export. But I seem to be missing something.
Found this tutorial which seems to do exactly that - but I lose it right around 3:35.
Do you know what the author is doing with Hypergraph Hierarchy? No audio - and he/she seems to use some shortcuts to do something right before exporting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcsABFdO78g

Any ideas?

#4

Exporting complex rigs to a game engine is not a simple task. Feature quality rigs have very complex structures.
İk, fk blending, constraints, sculpt, wrap deformers, etc. which are not compatible with game engines.
You can only export a fk skeleton chain with baked keys, skin weights and blendshapes (morph targets) to a game engine easily via fbx.
You can look at advanced skeleton tutorials ( which is a complex auto-rigger and has a game engine export option, free for personal use)
to understand what is going on under the hood.
http://www.animationstudios.com.au/advanced-skeleton
OR just skip the whole thing, and bake those vertices via alembic cache
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Content/AlembicImporter/
I didn’t try it myself but good luck with it.

#5

YES!

Success.! well./… sort of.
Followed advice # 2… “skip the whole thing and bake those vertices via alembic.”
Worked like a charm - on the tenth try or so.
Turns out I had to export every geometry independently (face & teeth, body, hair, cloth, shoes) all as separate baked exports. A few problems with normals, but the animation works beautifully.
EXCEPT… when I try to import - in this case, the character’s pants… Unreal displays an error (and does not import) because of a few faces with 5 vertices (when apparently only 3 or 4 are allowed per polygon?)

SO - question #1 - does that mean Unreal does not accept n-gons higher than 4?
AND IF SO… question #2 - If the character in Maya is rigged, weighted, etc… what can I do to optimize the geometry without losing the animation?

Other than that… i’m (almost) good to go. =)

#6

Hmmm…
Turns out that if I select all the meshes - and convert them to triangles - they export beautifully - and fixes the normals.
I do lose the textures - but that’s not a big deal… except for the eyes.

Therefoer… I think we have a winner =)
Thanks! This is going to be fun.