FBX Animation import taking too long in Unreal

Development Character & Animation
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1

I have an animation with over 15,000 frames, importing it in Unreal from Iclone takes OVER 40 MINS and sometimes it even crashes.

Even importing an animation from Blender with over 2000 frames, it takes a very long time!

How do i import big long animations into Unreal after animating in Blender/Maya/Iclone?

2

Why the heck so many frames? It’s almost like an hour-long animation. It won’t be optimized for games because the data is too huge to be loaded. Thus, I don’t think unreal is built for such a purpose as well. Is there a reason why you would need 15000 frames?

You could try to break it into smaller frames for the start.

3

Well, at 24 fps, 15,000 frames is about 10-11 mins of animation.

FBX export bakes all the animation on every frame, which means 15,000 keys on EACH BONE, which gets up to over A MILION keys while importing in Unreal ( yes, it says importing about 1,100,000 keys while importing the FBX )

Huge numbers, idk what I’m doing wrong. I’m trying USD or Alembic Imports, but well, same issue. huge file sizes with Alembic, and USD sometimes crashes (not always).

How do studios get their animations in Unreal? or make a Bi-Directional Pipeline?

4

As I said, you can try this.
I think huge studios mostly do the animations via the bridge plugin or inside the engine itself. Their plugins are designed to max out the optimization with the goal of importing the assets. I’m personally not sure if we have those advantages.

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5

Yeah… Iclone to Unreal has a Live link plugin but it also take a lot of time as well for transferring animation… welp.

I’ll update here if i find a solution

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6

did you manage to find a solution to keyframe reduce?

7

Hi, did you resolve your issue? I had the same problem until I checked the imported animation’s Platform Target Frame Rate is over 1000! So my guess is Unreal converts your animation to 1000fps, that’s why it took forever.
1

So I reimported and checked the settings and found out that the Use Default Sample Rate is unticked and the Custom Sample Rate is 0. So in my case, I just ticked the Use Default Sample Rate and it solved my problem. I hope it helps.
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1 Like
8

Thanks :slight_smile: , I had the same issue. That “Use Default Sample Rate” toggle fixed it. Also in iClone need to make to only export the wanted frames. Had 65 frame long animation that got exported as 180 frame long as default.