Need help exporting a null driven animation to unreal

#1

I have a spline and sweep nurb animation that is controlled by nulls and constraints. The problem I am having is how to export this from C4D to Unreal. I can’t seem to find anything online. If any one knows how or has better way let me know.

Hose
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#2

Have you tried baking out to PLA, or Alembic?

#3

Thanks for the reply Daniel. Yes I have. I’m trying to see if I can get it to import as a skeletal mesh in unreal. It keeps crashing when I do that. I was wondering if there is something special in C4D that has to be done to prevent that crash. It will import as geo cache in unreal, but when I sent that to the person that needed it, they told me it crashed on playback even though it did not on mine. Just trying to find to best procedure to export correctly.

#4

Skeletal meshes in Unreal expect only 2 types of objects:

  • Meshes
  • Joints

The meshes must be either

  • Skinned to a joint
  • Parented within a joint hierarchy

For joints in the hierarchy, there is a checkbox when importing in Unreal that you need to enable.
Any nulls in your rigs must be replaced with joints, you can do this easily with the Tools->Replace With command.

Any constraints should also be baked in the timeline Function-Bake menu

If, as I fear, you are using the nulls to drive points of a spline inside a sweep, then this kind of setup is not going to come across via FBX & Skeletal mesh

There are 2 other routes into Unreal you can look at:

  • Alembic import
  • Datasmith

It’s been a while since I looked at datasmith’s support of animation, it’s improving all the time.