bones from 3ds max to unreal?

I’m unable to open the ue4 documentation all week, said it’s on maintenance, but now it just won’t load.

I’m just looking for a comprehensive explanation on how you rig and animate something on 3ds max and then import it into ue4.

I know how to do the 3ds max part, let’s just say I just have a cilinder with 2 bones in IK, and it’s animated. how do I use it in ue4? say the cilinder is the character’s arm, so I press a button and it executes the animation?

it’s not really about how to do the stuff, but the pipeline. I’ve seen some videos but they go through a lot of stuff that I don’t need and don’t really explain how to go from one software to another.

could anyone point directions?
thanks

Simply Export/Import as FBX.

when trying to export fbx on max:

The plug-in has detected one or more animation controllers that cannot be directly supported. Using the Bake Animation option may better address these limitations. The following nodes are affected:
-Bone001
-Bone002
-Bone003
-IK Chain001

no support for the ik chain in fbx i suppose?

so let me try this differently
how do you send animations from max to unreal? i mean i know, you just keyframe the bones in the timeline and export it to fbx. but people rarely animate the bones directly, they have custom controllers and things linked through wire parameters and what not, so if fbx doesnt support a simple ik chain controller I assume all this custom stuff wont work. so how do you do it?

In the FBX export settings there’s an option there to bake the animation, that will take the animation that’s on the bones and apply it simply as keyframe animation so that it has the same animation but doesn’t have any of the IK rigging. You can also bake down the bones animation within 3ds Max and export that.

interesting!

I mostly make models so animation is a little on my weak spot. to bake it before converting, do you have to manually key every frame with all the bones selected? I found mostly scripts to bake, not sure how you would do it by hand

and another thing, do you have any performance impact in unreal by having every frame keyed vs key frames with interpolation curves?