Hey guys, so right now I’m using sequencer to render my short movie, and it’s awesome. although the engine has pretty good Ambient Occlusion built in I want to be able to export the sequence on my skeletal mesh (including the transform keys) to an fbx file so that I can render an extra AO on my characters. I was able to do this but the morph targets\ blend shapes didn’t transfer. I am using 3ds Max. Is there a settings that I’m missing or is it just not possible?
What’s happening is that I’m recording the actor animation in realtime ( both body and face ), but the rig has a “proxy” rig I specifically created.
In short, I have 52 joints,. each one with the name of the blend shape from the facial rig of the character.
In UE4 I linked the curve values ( 0 to 1 ) of each blend shape to the Z axis of the “proxy” rig.
Using Sequence Recorder I then record the entire thing in realtime, specifying the actor to record ( my character in this case ).
After the animation is recorded you have a FBX ( look at the Cinematic > Animation folder ), and you can export it to any DCC.
In Maya what I did is to use SKDs to link the 0 to 1 values of the proxy joints to the character facial rig, so that the facial animation is linked accordingly.
So you’re not exporting blend shapes themselves, but rather a joint that in UE4 is linked to the blend shape value, and you’re then able to get those values and assign them in your DCC using a simple script.
Nice! so it is possible, It’ll be hard to do this to all my characters but I think this is a great work around thanks.
I’ll keep a look out for new solutions
It’s a workaround yes, but you can trick the entire thing doing the following:
Instead of having the skeleton update for each character, you can just have a rig in Maya ( or whatever DCC you’re using ) where you only have the 52 joints ( inside the root joint ) and import that into UE4…remember to skin the rig to something ( like a very small plane ), otherwise UE4 won’t import the rig.
Create a BP and put the skeletal mesh in it and create the logic to link the morph target value to the joints Z axis.
Then in Sequence Recorded, when you choose the actor to record, you need to select both your character and the BP with the skeletal mesh with the 52 joints, so that they’ll be recorded together.
The result is that you’ll have 2 animations recorded, one is your character, the other one is the 52 joints, so that in Maya you can import them separately and using SDKs, you can link the values…
So you can repeat the same process for all your characters, without updating each skeletal rig, and use the “proxy rig” joints animation to drive the facial animation 
Hey man thanks so much for this method. As an animator I’m not as great with blueprints and figuring out the logic myself. Would you be able to share a screenshot of how you set up your blueprints to transfer the morphs/blendshapes to the rig bones?