Importing full Maya Sequence into UE4 as renderer

Development Cinematics & Media
1

Hey guys,

Just a question coming from a Maya background in cinematics…

If I was to just use UE4 as a renderer, then I can still use the same hair animation methods in Maya right?

For example) If my workflow is creating the whole animation and fully textured sequence in maya…

Textures in Working in Maya) Hair, clothing, skin and environment textures

Animations working in Maya) Char and Hair animations

Then exporting the whole sequence into UE4 using it just as a renderer (All animations and textures and camera angles are done)
Everything should be smooth right? No workflow problems, technicalities, etc?

2

No, the hair system in Maya is incompatible with any other program, same with clothing. It’s possible to simulate the clothing in Maya and then use Alembic to convert that animation to vertex animation so that UE4 can use it, but it’s not a simple export.
Besides that, you’ll have to rebuild your materials in UE4 and figure out how you want to do the lighting

3

I see,

Other than materials and lighting then,
I was told that hair animations could be done in Maya then exported into UE4?

If this holds true with Face premade animations, then it should hold true for hair as well?
(Many game cinematics use Faceware and faceware only works in Maya, so they would have to do the work in Maya before finally bringing into UE4)

4

For characters you can export bone animation and morph animation which covers most cases, there can be some extra features that a program might have that would not be compatible though, but basic skeletal and morph animation can be exported out.
Faceware helps with animation, where it can use motion capture or it has tools where you can set up many facial poses and it can make animations for things like lip sync when things are configured properly.

For hair, again, you can’t export Maya hair to UE4, you have to remake it, using hair planes most likely (take a look at the photorealistic character example now in the Launcher).

5

That photoreal char looks straight nice,

Ive noticed that many if not all game high fidelity character either have short hair, or compact hair…

Is there any way to use bone animations with the hair cards?(For female hair they look more like long hair cards, some of which twirl and curl)

6

You can rig hair with bones and then you would set up physics in UE4 like you would do a ragdoll, but I think some games use some kind of simple soft body physics. I’m not sure how they set that up exactly