How To Export Animation From Maya to Unreal Engine 5 Using Alembic Cache

welcome people inside my name is tyler today i'm going to show you guys the workflow of exporting animation from maya to unreal using olympic cache so first up we're going to do is we're going to create our reference from uh the model so i'm going to import this link so it's in here now i'm going to create the simple animation really quick okay so now that we have our animation what i'm going to do is i'm going to bring the reference in so instead of having it be referenced we're going to import it in so i'm going to import objects so now we have this uh we have our animation all ready to go what we're going to do is we're going to go over to the mesh and we're going to make sure for the materials that each mesh part it has a has the material applied to it at the face values so when you are doing this you want to go in uh if you know if the character only has one material that's great but usually they have multiple so you will go through and select all the individual faces and apply those materials and then yeah i would go into here and then whatever material it is uh once you have the phase selected you right click and you just do assign material to selection and you do that for all the pieces so now once we've gotten that what we're going to do now so uh before we go into unreal we're actually going to make sure these materials are labeled correctly so we're going to do is we're going to select each of the materials one by one and we're going to hit this little button here and put an output connection this is going to bring up the material menu material nodes and what we're mostly looking for is these names we want uh each of these to be named the material that we're going to name it the same in unreal so make sure that this is labeled not this one for whatever reason it only takes this uh this node so yeah make sure you do that for all of those so i'm going to combine all of the mesh into one piece and you want to be doing this after the animation is finalized and you're ready to export it so now we have the one piece we're going to go into the animation tab up here and we're going to go to key we're going to hit bake simulation and what this is going to do is going to bake the animation to the actual geometry so now we're going to go into cache limit cache if this isn't showing up you go to windows setting preferences plugin manager and you're going to type in abc i'm going to make sure that these are on so i'm going to limit cache we're going to do export selection just so you aren't grabbing everything um then we're going to just name we're going to name this test and we're going to scroll down these steps are extremely important so make sure you are looking at these make sure that this is on for materials as when you create the new materials from the referenced object it renames it and puts a colon in and unreal does not like colon so it will not work make sure you have right face sets on and then all of these other ones are optional export selection i'm just going to put it in the cache so now we are in our project folder we're going to go to cache alembic as you can see the test is in there so now what we're going to do is we're going to go into unreal and put the animation in we're going to drag our cache into unreal uh make sure that if you combined it it will only if you combined the geometry correctly it should only have one thing listed in the track name so now what we're going to do is we're going to go over to import type we're going to change this to geometry cache and this is where you can adjust your animation frame start frame end you can also take this to if you don't want to have specifics for that we're going to scroll down to find materials make sure this is ticked and also make sure you have made the materials from maya in unreal already um you can also do create materials as well i'm not sure if these work in conjunction but you could also try this and then usually uh the limit cache it will auto recognize it's a maya file and then make sure that you have this x make sure you turn this from 0 to 90 as the directions for maya to unreal are different i believe that should be it and make sure flatten tracks is ticked also so we're gonna hit import and uh depending upon how much animation data you have this could take uh like five seconds or it could take minutes uh it really depends so now i'm going to do is i'm going to drag our character in and as you can see the materials are being applied if they are not being applied that means the something has not been labeled correctly and i'm going to show you where i have the textures so this is all the the textures and materials are listed so as you can see these are all the same names as the file and it will give you a in the output lock it will give you some yellow text of hey this isn't labeled correctly um you need to go back and relabel it and then if we want the geometry cache to actually play we're going to go to content make sure you already have a level sequence ready to go i'm going to grab my character we're just going to drag it into the sequencer we're going to hit track geometry cache and so now you can see the animation is playing so yeah thank guys watching hope you enjoyed i'll see you guys on the next video

Channel: Modeling With Animation

Views: 23,834

Keywords: 3D Modeling, Modeling, Animation, 3D Animation, Tips

Id: tiPP9Pk18DI

Length: 6min 27sec (387 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 18 2022