Me and my brother are developing a game, and we use Blender and a camera to make the mocap. The character model have blend shapes. It’s fast to import the animation, but if we import the model with the mocap (about 500 frames, like 30 seconds, 50.000 keys), it takes a lot of time to import on UE4 (almost one hour and it isn’t imported). Update: UE4 crashed, so it wasn’t imported.
Are we doing something wrong? Is it possible to export only the curves data from Blender to UE4?
That’s probably your problem 30 seconds, 50.000 key = 50000/30 = 1666.666 frames per second.
Try something closer to 30FPS or 60FPS.
You may also consider sharing a screenshot of your dope sheet. Maybe the keys you mean are not (hopefully) the keys on the sheet.
Great Scott. It really does look like 1666 keys per second.
You need to find a way go eliminate all frames between timed intervals.
I would start with 60fps, so eliminate frames every .6 of a second. (Or every 60/1000 (6/100) 16 milliseconds approx).
Not sure exactly what the best way to just remove the excess is, you may need to hit Blender artists for ideas on that if google doesn’t present immidiate answers.
On a 30 sec. dopesheet you should still be able to see the individual keyframes even if zoomed out to have it fit the whole screen (home key shortcut).
also, within blender you can probably get away with 1 frame every .25 seconds if you use curves properly in the animation process.
I know you are dealing with some mocap data, but the theory still applies…
The only way to reduce the number of “totalkey” from the first image was deleting part of the animation, but then I will not have what I want. The hardest part (the motion capture) is ready, now I just want to export. I think there may be some right setting for this. I’m just using 9 drivers. It’s a very simple face animation, just 9 shape keys. In future, I want to use like 20 shape keys or more, to achieve a more realistic animation.
It’s very hard to find information about this because it’s very advanced I think.
What you have said about the total key number is right. At some moment after change a lot of settings like on NLA editor, I was able to reduce the amount of total keys and import on Unreal, but after that I tryed a lot and couldn’t find what exctly I did, however it was just part of the animation and with only one shape key moving.
I think the final animation will be very cool, because the character will move exactly like I move on the camera, like the big studios do just using a simple webcam, Blender and UE4.
Thank you very much for helping me to find what was the problem (the number of keys), now I will keep searching how to solve this problem. If I find how to properly export from Blender to Unreal, I will post here.
I would use pyton.
Just find the proper script to remove keys from the track. You have the time interval from my quick math above.
it should be simple enough to loop through the animation by time intervals and remove the in between keys.
I’m currently doing something similar but with the bones instead.
Not sure how you got to that many keys to be honest. It must have been a fat finger setting mistake on the capture or during the keying process.
Hope you find the right pyton commands and can sort what would otherwise take hours in 20 min or less. Best of luck.
