Blender 2.78 - Alembic - Unreal 4.13

[Andreve]

@adriano.ol;584561

Hi,

I am testing a workflow for rendering character animations in real time using Blender and Unreal with Alembic as exchenge format.
Both Blender 2.78 and Unreal 4.13 are in beta phase and now support Alembic 1.6.

My findings so far:

• If animation is armature (bones) driven, you had better activate “Flatten Hierarchy” on Blender’s Alembic exporter. Otherwise Unreal crashes.
• [Great!] Unreal can import materials from Blender with correct names and its faces’ assignments!!! Thanks’ to Alembic 1.6, I think.
• Unreal imports well meshes and animations, as long as exported faces are tris or quads.
• Models are imported 1/100 small, rotated (y-z up confusion) and mirrored in x-axis. (What a mess! )
• Huge problems with normals. I think it is related to Unreal not liking non-triangulation on faces in .abc. Most of times it can be solved activating “Force one smoothing group per object” and “Recompute Normals”.

It is important to state that exporting FBX from Blender to Unreal is a piece of cake, so these issues are related to Alembic implementation in both programs so far.

I hope we can improve on that because the partnership Blender-Unreal (both free) is the way to go.

(Download Latest Builds: Blender Builds - blender.org)

Adriano

Also getting the normal issues similar to yours
Hope this will be resolved soon, aslo busy setting up an animated short inside UE4 and also now hit the same problem. Not sure if the issue resides on Blender 2.78 Alembic exporter not quite conforming to industry standards yet, or on UE4 side.