Maya to Unreal Alembic Workflow (The Correct Way)

okay hey um i just wanted to make a quick video uh to show how to properly import um alembic files into the unreal engine while maintaining their material properties well not material properties but the materials that you have applied um i've seen a few videos that talk about it on youtube and no one really has it quite right it seems and it took me a few nights of some heavy research trying to figure it out and i i find it weird that it's not really documented on either unreal or maya's side so anyway uh here we go i guess so i'm gonna do to examples one like the regular way you'd apply materials and stuff and then one the face way which i'll talk about when we get to it but um so i'm gonna just do these i've already created uh three lambert materials just uh rgb or red green blue just standard materials lambert materials not stamper standard okay so i'm just going to go randomly apply these to to these balloons that i've made quickly here um let's do that sure you guys could be green [Music] and i think i have one done here okay and you guys can be red so kind of like just a simple balloon thing so that's kind of how you'd apply materials um regularly um but the way that i want to do it or that you need to do it for this to work let me just kind of hide this down here is let's try and make this the exact same um okay so if those are all the blue ones that we want to make blue um so that they are the same as the other one we actually want to switch to face mode and select all your faces and then apply the blue material here this is actually different than applying it to just the object selection like if you're just to select the object and apply it selecting the faces is actually different than that so what it's going to do is it's going to create a face set that that material is applied to rather than just applying the material to the object okay and that's the important part and that's what's going to make this work so let's go here and just continue doing this this is green making sure to apply them to the faces okay so now on the face material side they're applied to the faces on the standard material side they're applied just regularly um and i've also given oh actually i haven't done that yet because i open the file up again sorry i'm going to close the hypershade so right now this will act the exact same in maya it doesn't really matter which way you do it [Music] um oh sorry 24. so i'm just going to do a quick animation here um and then push these guys up to like 1.5 or something sure for 12 key selected and breaking back down okay so this is going to be my animation this this obviously will work for any models so if you've got characters or whatever that have multiple materials um uh this should work for that anyway so i'm gonna just go ahead and save my scene as set up maths just in case getting the habit of saving things often okay so let's export the standard ones first um as alembics here so make sure to go to cash and to export the selection only as olympic or to alembic and then we ought to come down here and we've got to turn some stuff on so uv right right face sets that's important um i do world space and then right uv sets too um i'm not entirely sure if you need this one or this one i just do them both doesn't really matter you can also turn all of them on if you want i think that's actually maybe maybe i should hold my words there um i don't think i need color sets okay uh i would just stick to these if you're referencing um files in unreal is going to use the the material name or the material shader group name rather and i'll get to that in a second and that's going to have the namespace applied to it so in unreal you'd also have to have the namespace in your material name which is not good because i don't think in unreal you can name materials using the colon so if you've got models that are referenced in and they have name spaces or you're using namespaces you can hit strip namespace in this case i don't have that so i'm not going to use it cool all right so i'm just going to export these as uh oh i have right let's go to this folder and delete those oh here they are here cool um and then i'm just going to save them as those again just in case you think there's any funny business going i guess balloons standard mats sure that's the standard ones i have selected sure yes export it'll go through the animation and then i'm going to export these as well um sorry through cache alembic export selection double check and then export and i want to do this as face materials so go export selection and then i want to get back to that so cash alembic so here's our two files um so i'm going to keep that open for when we get into unreal here but first i want to open the hypershade backup so in unreal i think i already have these named um let me just open all of them there we go okay uh so you would think that it would use this material name here but it's actually going to use your shader group name so in this case it's the exact same as my material name except i have underscore sg after it so that's for the blue the red and the green so when we go into unreal which i'll have here you'll see that i have those materials already made um so let's let's do some importing now so i'm gonna just import the standard map and i'm going to do that a couple ways just to kind of show you um i'll try and do it the the way that a couple videos that i've seen have have said to do it and i'm going to explain why that's wrong um so let's just import our standard one which is the one again with just applying the materials to the object shapes rather than the face or the faces so yeah geometry mesh 0 to 24 which is our animation and then uh this flattened tracks here a lot of the videos that i saw told you to turn it off i'm going to keep it on for this one and i'll turn it off for the next time i import the standard one here but just to show you the difference and then i want them to try and find these materials that i've made so i'm going to hit find materials and then i'm just going to make sure that it's rotated in 90 90 degrees and x so that it comes up right side up in uh in unreal since unreal uses z up and uh maya uses y up but anyway so those are really the only three things that i've changed off the default alembic import in unreal here so i'm just going to hit import it'll go through this kind of stuff so here i've had uh flattened tracks turned on and what it's done is it's collapsed all of my tracks or all my tracks all of my uh shapes like my different balloons down to one mesh that unreal reads and it also collapsed all the materials down to one material so i don't have three materials here so i can't apply my red blue and green materials here and if i were to throw this into the level and i'm probably gonna have to scale this up um because i built them pretty small or relatively small in maya compared to on rails units uh so you'll see that they've got no uh shapes applied to them they're shapes no materials applied to them uh not really what we want so let's delete this and try and re-import them again so first delete let's import the standard here and then we'll do it the way that a couple videos have have said to do which is to uncheck this flattened tracks so now we'll import that that's the only thing i've changed everything else stayed the same so i'm still trying to find the materials and i'm still rotating at 90. on x so if i import here now what that's going to do to this shape is it's going to hold all of my geometry kind of as separate geometries or separate objects within the alembic cache and because of that it has to create a material for each one of them so now you'll see that i've got way more than three materials here so there's actually one material for each balloon in my scene also now what we want but if i throw this into the scene here um and scale it up again probably could do this on the import probably and you'll see again that there is no materials applied to it so let's uh keep this here and we'll put it to zero zero zero i think this will be where we want them so let's import that the face material ones and here i want to make sure that i keep flattened tracks on that's the only thing that i'm going to change i still wanted to try and find the materials and i'm still importing it at 90 degrees on x rotate it 90 degrees on x so let's import that and here's our face mats one so we'll see if we open this up we have all of our three materials here it's collapsed my object down to one mesh but it has retained the three materials and it's also grabbed the materials from the scene and just to be sure or just kind of an fyi they don't need to be in the same folder as you're importing them into these can be in their own material well i guess i should import these into somewhere else since this is my materials folder but anyway they don't need to be in the same folder for this to work it'll search the entire scene for all materials and it'll grab the ones that are named correctly so just make sure that you're using the shader group name and not the material name for maya and they should attach automatically like they have here and if i throw in this face one increase the scale again and put this to zero zero zero you'll see that it actually came in with the materials applied just how i wanted them and if i hit play our animation is there and it's there on both of them but the materials are already applied so if you have materials made that are already in unreal and you want them to just automatically apply to your models that you're importing you have to make sure to apply the the materials at the face level um on your objects in maya that way they'll create face sets and when you export them as alembic assuming that you export with the face sets option where is it here right face sets then everything should be fine and it'll work perfectly so i just wanted to clear that up because i know a lot of people are having trouble with it i was having trouble with it um so yeah hopefully that helps have a good one

Channel: Brendan O'Rourke

Views: 5,079

Keywords: Maya, Unreal, Alembic, Materials, Material, Video Game, Workflow, Automatic, Flatten Tracks, UE4, Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 4, Face Sets, Face Sets Maya, Alembic Workflow, Tutorial, Learning Maya, Learning, Learning Unreal, Learning UE4, Face, Sets

Id: 2hxsW8h7gfY

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021