I’ve been working on a team with a different engine and have been looking into shifting over to UE4. I’ve used UDK in the past - strictly from a level building standpoint. Right now I’m looking at exporting characters and animations as static meshes are old hat.
Our rigs are referenced into our animation files in Maya. I exported our base body mesh for a character along with the root joint of the rig’s joint system, thus creating the Skeleton. I load up an idle animation and source my rig reference, then export and check the animation option in the FBX menu. In UE4 I import animation and that goes fine, but when I load up the preview, the timeline bar is accurate and loops, but the preview is stuck in the first frame pose - no actual animation.
Am I missing a step, or some option in the export/import process? Is it the reference (created with maya’s own reference system) that is breaking the animation export? Any further details I can give to help solve this? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.
Hi,
From what you’ve described, there doesn’t seem to be anything in your workflow that is somehow incompatible with UE4. We reference our animation rigs into the individual anim files here also, and it works fine. So, we just need to figure out what is going wrong and where. The first thing I would do is import that Idle animation FBX back into an empty Maya scene and check that the joints are correctly animated in your export file. If they’re not (and my hunch is they won’t be), the problem exists in your export process somewhere. Are you baking all of the animation down onto your joints at export-time and then just doing an export selection on your joint hierarchy?
If the joints are correctly animated in your FBX but they’re still not importing correctly, could you send your FBX to us? The engine team is constantly making improvements to the import process, and problem files like yours are very helpful for that.
Thanks!
Thank you for the quick reply! I did forget to mention that in the maya animation file, I exported as fbx with animation the root joint plain, and then did a second one with the bake animation option checked under the fbx export options. I imported both fbx’s into blank scenes and you were correct, no animation. Two anomalies as well, when importing I recieved an error message that constraints could not be imported (not sure if that has anything to do with this or not), the second is that the main control curve got imported with them, even though the root joint was constrained to it rather than direct parented. I’m assuming that it is doing this just because although it is an indirect control method the curve is still ‘above’ the root in hierarchy.
So, with that done, I’m doing something wrong with exporting my animation fbxs. Any advice on proper protocol I should follow? Thanks again for helping me out.
Hmm. Let’s try baking everything in the Maya scene before we attempt to export. So, grab your joint hierarchy (you can just grab the root and then click Edit > Select Hierarchy). Then, click Edit > Keys > Bake Simulation. This will bake all of your animation down onto the joints in your Maya scene. Finally, with the joint hierarchy still selected, do an Export Selection. Double-check that the animation option is checked in your FBX options, but leave the bake option unchecked.
That ‘should’ work. Also, having the main control curve in that FBX file shouldn’t hurt anything (UE4 should just ignore it), but if you want to eliminate that as a possibility, you can click Edit > Delete by Type > Constraints with your baked joint hierarchy selected and it should remove that connection.
Good luck!
Success! That was what I did wrong. Had to use Maya’s bake to joints feature rather than the fbx export option. We’re all good now. I really appreciate your help and swift responses sir, thank you so much!