How to Export and Import Animations into Unreal Engine 5 from Maya with Alembic Geometry Cache

howy everybody today we're going to be looking at how we can export animations from Autodesk Maya into Unreal Engine using the almic workflow so to be able to actually export this animation with almic you have to remember two very very important details now when it comes to a lmic it's going to be baking out all of this animation data into your actual mesh so because it's doing that you do not need to export your controls or your rig and in fact if you were to export your controls in your rig you actually find out that your lmic won't be imported and it'll actually be broken so make sure that you're only going ahead and selecting your actual mesh to export right here something super important to keep in mind is that if you were to export this with three mod which right now I'm on smooth 3 mode which is three it might actually not export with smooth preview and there's a reason for that almic unlike fbx doesn't actually detect smooth mesh previews upon export so to actually make sure that it's smoothed out what you actually have to do is go to one mode and then go over to mesh and then actually go ahead and press the smooth operation now this will actually properly smooth out your object right here it does add more geometry but now you're going to get that smooth preview that you already had with three mode but it's actually biged into your mesh and so now you can actually go ahead and Export this out with the smooth mesh preview so go ahead and select your object right here which is our Chimera and then what you want to do is is you want to go ahead and go to cash and then alumic cach now if you don't have this option do not fret because all you have to do is go over to Windows go to settings and preferences go to plug-in manager and make sure that ABC export and ABC import are loaded so now that we already have this there we can actually just go ahead and go to Cache almic cache and then you want to select export selection to almic now whenever you do this you're actually going to get a bunch of settings out here on the side the main thing I want to make sure is that I'm going with my entire uh frame range right here which is 1 to 237 which is correct so I can just go ahead and choose time slider for the time R now as I move down right here you'll actually see that you have advanced options this is where we'll be setting up some extra attributes that we want to export along with our mesh and our animation so some really important ones you want to make sure that you have is you want to make sure that you have UV right so that you're bringing UVS from Maya into there you want to go ahead and select UV sets as well if you're planning to use any sort of udims you want want to go ahead and write color sets and face sets and these right here are probably the most important ones along with World space so what world space does is that it actually makes sure that uh your items are in seen in the exact place they are according to the world instead of just exporting stuff according to the object this can be extremely useful if you have stuff parented to your bones or your animation and if they're actually exporting out if a character has multiple components that are parented together and are actually in relation to each other in the world space so this is why you want to go ahead and check this on right here optionally you can also select strip name spaces if you want to remove any sort of extra name spaces that my adds do it so I tend to just keep that on right there now that we have all this set up right here with the advanced options we can go to documents and then I'm going to type in Chimera uncore enemy and this will be the name of our lumic file now we can officially export and you that it is properly exporting because you see the animation playing back as it's writing out all the frames perfect now that we've actually exported this uh into an alumic file we can go ahead and go over to unre engine right here so now we have unre open we're inside of a v file and what we can do is we can go ahead and import this ABC file right here so let's go over to documents and let's let's actually search for our Chimera which should be right here it's our Chimera ABC file go ahead and open that up as you can see you have all of the different components of the Chimera along with when they're starting and ending animation right here so this looks pretty good now when you're importing a lmic the main thing you want to do is that you do not want to import this as a static mesh you want to go ahead and import this as a geometry cache so now we basically have our frame start our frame end and we have 0 to 237 right here and we have our stuff being in per frame now this is super important but the main thing you want to make sure that you do is you want to unselect flatten tracks this is super super super important and make sure to do this so that you're actually getting all of your materials and having them all separated out um instead of just having it just be one material or one mesh this is super important make sure you do this step now as you're done with this you can go ahead and move all the way down make sure to select create materials and find materials if you have any materials already configured once you do this you have your conversion preset to Autodesk mile now I tend to find out that this preset doesn't necessarily work so I just go ahead and add 90° to the xais to kind of rotate it out now we can go ahead and officially import this and you can see that it's actually failing import and so we can actually see right here that it's unable to import it because there are 14 vertices that are not actually trying angles or quads so they have Eng gon almic is super super strict with the fact that whatever geometry you bring absolutely needs to not have any end guns so to kind of fix that I can actually go over here to mesh I can go over to cleanup and then I can fix by tessellation any faces with more sides I can go ahead and fix some other stuff as well so now that I do this right here I can press clean up and then it should have fixed all of the those spes so yeah we can go ahead and actually just export this right again so go to alumic Cache export selection to alumic and we have all of our settings pretty much set up right here so I just have to select this file export selection yes I want to replace it awesome so now that we have this exported let's go ahead and import this into unreal go to import go ahead and select your Chimera right there and as you can see we have our Chimera with our start and end frame from 0 to 237 we want to make sure flatten tracks is off again and then create find materials have everything set up now we can import now the import process is going to take a little bit of time because it's loading in all of your animation but once it's done you'll actually see your asset appear onto the content drawing and there we go we have our animation right here all ready to go we can go ahead and click and drag our object into here now we actually might have to scale up our object right here as you can see we have our Chimera all nice and good I might be wondering wait why is it not playing the animation so to be able to play your animation go to contend drawer again make sure that you go to a level sequence or create a level sequence let's go ahead and click and drag this into our level sequence go to track and then make sure you select geometry cache and now when you do it you can see your animation playing right as we want it to be perfect and actually if we go ahead and select our character right here we see we have our material that we need all ready to go as well so we can just select this and replace it with whatever material that you want to and there we go that is how we export and import alumic files with animation from Autodesk Maya into blender

Channel: Adithya Sathyanarayanan

Views: 1,600

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Id: WvClOdbHYbQ

Length: 7min 42sec (462 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2023