Hey there,
so, I´ve been transitioning slowly from 3ds max to Unreal Engine for most of our pipeline for the past 2 years.
The last thing I couldn´t replace yet was the amazing TyFlow for particles.
For 70-80% of my use cases I can simply export as alembic for deforming sims (cloth/animated particles/tyMesher) and for everything else I just export the particles as objects with baked transform keys and then export these via Datasmith to Unreal.
As long as you limit the minimum scale on export in tyFlow, you can avoid most issues upon import in Unreal.
As long as your particle count stays beneath 4000-6000 particles.
In my experience, 2000 is a particle count Unreal can still handle. Above that I usually export i batches at max 2000 particles and then use the exported animation sequences as subsequences in my main sequence.
But as soon as I try to add more subsequences than that, Unreal usually freezes as it fills up all my ram (64gb as of now).
So.
A) Has anybody else encountered this issue and if so, have you found a workaround?
B) Is there a known hard limit when it comes to animated tracks in datasmith OR sequencer in general? I guess this is a pretty niche use case for sequencer, so it might not have been tested at all by the devs.
C) Isn´t there any dev out there willing to program a plugin that allows us to at least import PRT sequences with Niagara, that DOESN´t involve a round trip to houdini…?
Any help would be greatly appreciated and eventually I will probably look more into Niagara and the new motion tools to replace at least some of my tyFlow work, but that will probably still take a few years…