Hi all,
Very excited about UE4 going free!
I was hoping I could ask some advice on using UE4 to render directly to video. Among those of you doing offline renders, how are you managing the movement of assets into UE4? How are you handling lookdev and shading? And most importantly, how are you rendering, if not manually loading animations into Matinee and rendering out a move from the editor?
I’ve been looking for a pipeline for getting animation from Maya into a game engine, and being able to render out single frames (or full animations) from the command line, based on some sort of pre-defined format. It could be regular Unreal Maps, provided animators could run a single process to introspect a Maya animated scene and rebuild the same without having to manually import assets, place them, pick animations, etc. Ideally there would also be a custom converter written for ShaderFX output so that assets wouldn’t have to be re-lookdev’d inside the UE4 editor (a small mountain of a project in its own right).
I’m not above coding in C++, and I expect this will require a significant time investment both on the UE4 side and from within Maya as well. Is there anyone who’s done this, and can you please offer hints as to where to begin? I’m in a unique position at the moment to possibly pitch this as a development project to my company, but at the moment no matter how much of the docs I read I can’t say that I have enough of an idea of what’s involved to communicate the needs and scope of a project like this to anyone else.
Thanks in advance,
~ C