I am trying to use characters animated in Blender to render cinematics for a short movie in Unreal.
I want to use Alembic, as long as they have some deformations not compatible with FBX. Also, in a similar project I had problems with FBX precison in a Blender-UE4 workflow: like a character holding a glass, but the glass not quite in sinc with the hand.
I think Alembic is the way to go. But:
Unreal is too slow when importing long animations in Alembic.
Unreal (4.18) use to crash while importing some Alembic files.
There is a problem with normals. I think it is ralated to a lazy algothithim while inverting the mesh and V channels (3ds Max scheme). In result, for instance, wrinkles get inverted in the character skin.
Unity is way better in this metter. I don’t want to change from UE4, but the job needs to be done…
Hey I don’t have an answer but i agree to, the import process is very slow. I need it for the cloth sim , as a potential workaround now i’m testing the UE new cloth system but the quality is not enough for cinema needs. I hope someone will come with a solution.
1 - Make sure your export frame rate (30fps) matches with the frame rate in UE, make the frame rate fixed to 30 fps in UE4, this should avoid syncing problems.
2 - With the above setup placed. Don’t use alembic, use baked morph channels and import FBX with skeleton (for the mesh bounds only) I don’t know how this is possible in Blender but Max requires custom scripting. I know Alembic does import them as morphs if you choose skeleton mode, but its not the same as importing fbx skeleton with morphs, plus file size is also not optimized in Alembic, I haven’t tested performance differences though, I suspect FBX morph would be faster, and most definitely much smaller in file size.
3 - Another option is to create many bones (1 for each 4 vertices or 8, depending on the resolution of the mesh, you could even create one bone per vertex) that are attached to a simulated cloth and then they are skinned to a mesh, This will require most setup but FBX will work well while retaining the pre-baked sim quality and will be future proof.
4 - UE cloth very primitive even for games standards. Even older Apex features are either missing or removed.
The thing I can most agree is that if you know how to do it faster and better, do it.
The second thing is (if you are allowed) to send the file and fill a bug report form (there is a new one) that Im sure they will look into it.