Alembic streaming for animation shot

Development Character & Animation
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Hi!

I’m totally new to Unreal Engine. I am working in an animation studio and we want to try UE5 to render our upcoming short. We are used to Unity since we did some tv shows rendered inside. I need to find the same features to achieve this short.

Basically we have our server on which every artist retrieve the assets. We have an alembic for each shot of our episodes. We then stream the alembics in Unity and do the rendering. In that way we do not need to push the abc files on GitHub that we use to collaborate between artists and TDs.

How can I stream alembics from the disk without importing it in my UE5 project? I found this topic on the 2020 roadmap (https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/1-unreal-engine-public-roadmap/c/209-alembic-streaming-beta?utm_medium=social&utm_source=portal_share). I don’t know how to access this feature. If anyone knows I will be very pleased to know how!

Thanks for reading,

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Does anyone know if it’s possible to stream alembic without import it in the project? It would be easier for our workflow.

Thank you!

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Anyone ?

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Hi, actually it’s possible to stream your alembics into Unreal without importing them (I don’t know if it was possible back then I think it was). I believe it was a plugin in UE4 called “ABC Streaming”, but I don’t see it in UE5, so maybe it is already built in within the “Geometry Cache” plugin, which has to be enabled.

In any case, once you have that feature activated, you just have to add an object you your scene (From the “Place actor” panel), called “Geometry Cache ABC File Actor”. Is in this actor that you configure the route and all the settings for your abc file, then you can add it to your Sequence Level, and add its “Geometry Cache” track.

Hope this helps!

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