Maya to Unreal FBX and Alembic

today we're going to be moving a character from Maya to Unreal here we have this bug and it is animated and just rigged regularly as you would have when you're going to Unreal you want to make sure that you grab the geometry and Joints so you're going to need those two things in there and so we're going to go to file go down to export selection and we're just going to export out the rig as an fbx so we're going to go down to fbx save this in my folder here I'm going to create a Maya um Workshop create a new folder I'm going to call this new folder Maya to Unreal open that up and I always have a folder in here called too unreal and usually I'll put all my fbx files in there animation files I'm going to name this arachnid and then I'll save it this is exporting out an fbx file and I'll say that there might be some errors um usually that's nothing A lot of times it's nothing to worry about so I'm just going to open up unreal click on this and we're using 5.1 a lot of times if um if things aren't working sometimes in unreal it's just a matter of updating the Unreal Engine and they've usually added whatever problem it is they've usually added a fix for it in the next version at least that's been my experience so we're going to open this up now this may take a long time but I've sped it up here it has to calculate the the rendering or the textures and the scene file and it takes a while but once it loads it once you've loaded it on the computer it goes fine so if it's just taking a long time feels like it's hanging just let it go so we're going to create a film and video file we're just going to use a blank file here we're going to click on that our blank template and I go to where we want to save this project unreal isn't Project based program so you have to bring the entire project with you just just don't want to bring you know one element with you you can't just bring like the Maya you know like the one Maya file you have to bring the whole project so we're going to go to our unreal project open this up we're going to select that folder oh this is where we're selecting the folder I'm going to call this um what I call this we will call this unreal from Maya from Maya and then we'll create oh yeah we'll take off the starter content that's just like the starter content is just extra stuff um like chairs and geometry and things that you don't necessarily want in your film and uh yeah this is where Maya or this is where unreal might hang or actually it will hang for the first time you open it usually gets stuck at about 45 and then it takes a while so I'm gonna pause it and now it is open so once it is open here um you can click on control and shift or you can click on this the content drawer in the bottom left hand corner we're just going to do a control and space bar there we go so this is basically um like a staging area where you can pull in assets that you want to use for unreal you don't have to use any of them but in the upper right hand corner is where your world is so we're just going to right Mouse click go up to import files and we are going to go to our Workshop homework uh not homework I'm unreal to Maya and then to our unreal folder and we're going to open this and in here um we're going to be making sure that we have the skeletal mesh and it's going to import the mesh we aren't importing animations here uh we go down um when you're importing oh it's in it's up a little higher what we want to make sure to do is if you have a character that has blend shapes we're looking for the unshaping so you go to Advanced here go down to um yeah import morph targets so if you don't have that on you won't have any blend shapes this doesn't have any blend shapes but I wanted to show you where it is and everything else should be good um yeah if you're working in Maya if you increase this scale to 10 that's a pretty good pretty it's been a pretty good scale for me generally you want to have your objects to be the same size that they would be in real life because your lighting is based off of physical lighting so change of scale and you're going to change your your lighting properties so I was building the mesh this might take a minute but I sped the process up and just cut this stuff out so just have to be patient there again it comes up with some errors you might want to look at them one of the errors that I'm getting here is that when I rig the thing the knees were giving me a problem so um it says use t0 as a reference pose basically that's like frame zero of your animation to put it at um at zero so if I just um even though I've imported it in I can close this and I can double click on the the skeleton mesh here you might you probably won't have to do this but if you do this is the way to do it go over to the arachnid and then go down I just double clicked on the um skeletal mesh and then keep going out here this t0 as reference post just click that on and then go back and re-import the base mesh and again this might take a minute but I'm going to speed it up so with that out of the way we can go back into our main window here and I'm just going to take the skeleton I'll just drag it out to see how it looks and you can see in our outliner to the right that we have our arachnid skeleton so I can zoom around here I'm just using the right Mouse button and w A and D so if you ever moved around like a third person so I'll just move it around again with the a D um S and W keys and holding the right Mouse button now we're going to pop over to Maya and we'll get the animation for this file so we're going to be using the same the same selection set someone here give me an error that there's it's smoothing but um oh I'm actually if you're going to be exporting out a model you could do it this way you just want to make sure that Z out but this is for modeling I want to be under animation Clips I'm just going to export out the animation I'm going to export out the selection that I have so that's going to be the geometry and the joints and I'm just going to make it sure it's Z up it's going to be ASCII um Z up Z is the Z up is the orientation in zebra in uh automobile so we're going to go and say what folder we want to save this animation file in so I'm going to go to my Maya to Unreal project and then I'm going to go to my to Unreal that means I know that this is file that I'm making specifically that's going to be used in unreal so I'll call this well this is going to be the folder so I'll just choose it and I'm going to rename this so it's not going to be raw but it's going to be raw underscore or annum and I put that in there so that I know if something is an animation file or if it's a you know and so with all of that we hit okay that's kind of making me think that it is going to be not quite right because it took basically no time that's a good indication that there's going to be something wrong but we'll just try it I'll write Mouse click go to import game character import oh I want to make a new folder here and we'll call it animation so we'll put if we had a lot of Animation files we put it in there import and we're going to call it a roar file and you can see that that didn't work so it says node geometry is selected so what that means is that I just selected the groups of those things but I actually need to set select the hierarchy in Maya so we'll just pop back into Maya I'm going to do a select uh that's modify I'm going to go to select and then down to um hierarchy apply so hire me and in hierarchy now it has selected everything not just the group geometry in joints then we'll go and I'm going to create a selection set this is just going to make it easier for later on and so I don't have to do like select the hierarchy and I'm going to go to I'm calling this call this we'll call this arachnid and then underscore and call it exp for export and so now I can go instead of selecting all you know individually I can just do this export selection and then it's going to select all those that selection set automatically um and everything else should be fine and now you can see it's going to take a little bit more time and then it says okay it's all good we're going to pop back into Maya or unreal and we're going to close that I'm going to do control and space to bring my tray up again bring our Roar animation and hit open you don't need to bring the mesh in again so we're just going to turn off the skeletal mesh we don't need to have that but we do need to make sure that the arachnid skeleton is selected up there under skeleton um and then animation length and that should be good okay and now we have the animation file so I can kill like just the rig this is basically just the rig I'm just going to select it and then press the delete button and press Ctrl and shift and then I'm going to click and drag this out now you can see that it's tiny it's because I scaled the other one so I'm going to open this back up double click on it and there's my animation you can see it going just pause this I will bring it down down okay and then up here we'll set it to 10. and we'll hit up three important animation so now it's going to re-import the animation only it's going to have a scale of 10. now if I close this out and pull this back out you can see it's going to be a better size all right so now with the better size all so now that we have that we can hit the play button and again we're moving around just like a game with the w D and S key and there's our animation plane there it goes now we're gonna hit escape to get out of that and let's now try doing this with um with Maya and alemic cash so we will go into one more time here we go so there it is the w a W key d and S backwards D will move forward all right then once you're done with that escape and now let's go to Maya and get this thing going okay so we're back in Maya and instead of doing this what I want to do is use cache and you can see we only have geometry cache available to us so we need to load the plugin so go to Windows and then down to plugin manager and I'm going to type in alembic but um it's not there it's actually you have to type in ABC apply it that way but I mean it makes an ABC file so you just want this exporter and importer if you want to import them and then you can do close and then once we have that now we have available to us is this Olympic cache and so I can again select my uh this time I just need the geometry so I'm just going in selecting just the geometry and I select the um geometry export cache but I don't I don't actually need to do that um I don't know I did that but instead you want to go to cash alumn bit cache and then export all exports uh selected selection to Olympic and I'm going to open up the window and when I open up the window and then I'm going to make it so that it's a time length of my timeline there and you want to you want to make sure that you get these settings here for the UV UV right and pick any color sets but the UV set those will help you enable it to be able to have the um the texture on it when you bring it in and then if we scroll back up to the top here selection okay and find our window to move to the Maya and then two unreal and we'll call this um arachnid you know save this out as a um all projects click on erected and then we'll change that to alembic so we have the ABC file format in there it's also important um that we remove any um like zero file size so in that Olympic at the top there's the um you want to make sure to turn on zero file size or zero like animation in the beginning of it okay so we're going to pop back over to unreal and we're going to go back to our character and we'll go into the import and we'll import our arachnid ABC open it it's going to say that there's an existing arachnid so we're just going to cancel that no now right Mouse click on this again and we'll just rename that file so we'll go to import and we'll just instead of having arachnid ABC we'll just have it right Mouse click on this rename and we'll call this underscore Olympic and it's iPhone so we just need to select it there we go and hit open then we're going to go down to not static mesh but we want to have our geometry cache that's what we're doing now here's where I was talking about when you're importing that is very important is that you also want to have this thing here there it is this skip empty frames so if you have any frames that are like have zero files it might take a while if you wanted to to work right off you know right out of the gate you can do that okay so we import it and again importing these frames can take a while but uh sped the process up and so you just have to wait a little bit then once that is imported here there it is and we can just click and drag that out onto our scene now you can see the the orientation is set up as as X we could or as a y up so we could change this in here in our orbit probably this orbit yaw but I'm just going to leave it and I'll just um change that in unreal so we'll close that I'm going to open it back up and we'll drag this out onto our stage you can also see that it's tiny so I can go in here and click on this undo and it'll set it to the zero Point here it's in the ground we'll just pull it out of the ground and rotate it find my mouse there it is okay so we'll rotate it in the X direction see how it's our that's translate let me do that one and I have a lot of things open so it's kind of laggy for me right now so we'll do rotation 90. it's back oh there it is put it back in the ground again do that get it back okay there we go you can hit f um we'll focus on thing all right now let's rotate this thing it's rotate it by 90. there we go and right now it has a um it has a texture on it if we click on the little the word texture it'll use the texture from the other file that we have there you go there's our texture in the reckon and for the scale we just click on this lock and then type in 10 here enter and now it's the same size as our other one and we can move one over so they're not tripping on top of each other I don't know and there's our arachnids we can hit play we should be able to see both of them moving the and workout and then there and they're both playing one the one on the left has the joints the one on the right is just the geometry that we imported in now if we wanted to render these out we can go up to this little Clapper here click on ADD level sequence click on that and it'll ask us where we want to save it and right now we'll just save it here and we'll just rename the sequence call it like shot underscore shot zero one underscore zero one underscore zero one our first shot first scene let's save and our first scene for shot then what we're going to do is uh I'm just going to um take this and from our stage drag it into our level sequence and then I'm going to select the other one and I'll pull that one into our level sequence so if you want to have the animations you have to have the character or the object in the animation sequence now we just have to attach our animation and to do that we just need to click on track here for the um this is the alembic and we're going to click on Geometry cache component that we're going to attach arachnid a limit and we'll click on this uh let's see geometry cache there we go so I add my geometry cache in there and now it's animating and then we want to add the other one we can add our animation track under animation the roar track slide that down you just grab it and slide it and now they're both moving if you wanted to have them offset here you could um you could take and grab one and just click and drag it and offset it and then their animation is going to be offset so here we have one going and then we have the other one I'll just set those back I'll add a camera zoom out you can see I'm kind of going off so I will pull my camera back a little bit more there you go perfect so that's where we're gonna it's gonna be the animation that we'll do and then when we want to render we're going to the clapboard here just make sure yeah we're going to do a movie render queue so we'll just click on this platform and then Let's see we have the main map is what we're going to be using shot one one scene one we're going to click on unsaved and these are things these are settings that you can have if you don't want a JPEG sequence you can just turn that off and then do settings and then we're going to do a PNG sequence so click on settings and then PNG sequence click on that and that will add this to our list of things that we can add in here so click on that energy sequence once that's selected we can look at our our output and you can here you can set the resolution you can change the frame numbers and if you have your frame padding that you want to change but everything looks we'll just use everything for right now click accept and then we also just want to see where it is it says project directory Saved movie renders click on render and it will sit here and calculate so it's going to compile the shaders and things like that I'm going to speed this up but just be patient let it do its thing once it gets up to 99 100 then it'll start rendering it and that that only happens on the first time you render the second time it'll just start rendering so you can see it's knocking out these frames here pretty quick and then we will we can find these files close that and we'll open up after effects After Effects and again I've sped it up so after effects when that loads up you'll want to rent Mouse click in the project do file import or import file and then we're gonna find out where our videos are so to find out where the videos are I forgot you can see the output is here you can click on that and what this does is um right now I didn't change where the output was going to be so generally it'll save it in the project setting of or in the project folder of unreal and just close these on two and close this close that one so we'll go back to After Effects and so we're just going to navigate to our project the unreal project in the workshop Maya 2 unreal unreal and then there's a saved folder now and in the save folder there's movie renders folder and in there will be our images and I can just click on one of those it's going to be import as footage it's going to create the composition for us already and everything should be good import and there is our comp RAR all right then we're going to go to we want to make this a movie we're going to composition and then we are going to you could either add to render queue and then render it out in After Effects or you can go back into composition and do it through um media encoder I personally like media encoder better just because it has I think some better outputs to it so we'll click on composition here and then down to Adobe Media encoder and we'll open this up and again I'm going to speed this up and when this loads up it'll be empty here but just be patient it will load it'll put your project in here now you want to tell it where you want it to save and so we're going to go into um spring composition or go to animation Workshop go to my unreal and I'll just save it right in here shot one zero one MP4 and just save this and hit play and click play and it'll think pretend to think pretend to think and the way it goes and now I can open this in in the player so just find it to Unreal file there's my mp4 shot and away it goes now it's a little a little slow on here because I have a lot of things running and I'm recording at the same time so you should your mileage may vary to so but there it is and away it goes and that is how you end up rendering and animating in both um as fbx and 11.

Channel: 3DMotionblur

Views: 9,387

Keywords: Maya, Unreal Engine, FBX, Animation, Alembic

Id: KYtXbInCDHM

Length: 32min 31sec (1951 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 07 2023