Cloning instances of collision ready actors for interaction with animated FBX

Hello Unreal world!

I am relatively new to Unreal Engine. I have been blown away by it’s capabilities!! I am a motion graphics freelancer/Graphic designer/Character artist. I am mostly interested in utilizing Unreal Engines real time rendering capabilities for motion graphics and or creating short animated films.

I have been working on a logo animation which I animated in Cinema 4D, I have exported it as an FBX and imported it into Unreal with no problem. I had to run it through Maya’s Game exporter to get a few things to work right.

Basically the animation is for an outdoor kitchen company and I would like to have the logo elements emerge from burning charcoal.

I have created some charcoal models in Zbrush and imported them into Unreal as well. The issue is I want to clone these pieces of charcoal across a plan to have the logo elements emerge from them and collide with them as them move upward through the pile. But I am unsure how to clone them.

I have tried using the Foliage brush tool, but It wont work. I want to paint them onto a box created in UnreaI. I have dragged the charcoal static mesh into the foliage tool box and checked the box saying it should paint on static meshes. Then I make sure the box is checked inside the foliage mesh icon.

I know in Cinema and Maya there are Cloner mograph/MASH networks I could use to achieve this effect, but I am trying to do this in Unreal to save on render times.

I am not sure what I am doing wrong, or if there is another method I should be using to get this effect.

I could totally be going about this wrong, any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Thank you all for your time!!

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