I’m working on a Facerobot rig , (Autodesk XSI Softimage) with tons of facial animation - currently, and if we could import into UE4 the vertex animation as point cache, it would save me weeks of work. FBX can already hold point cache data, and I’m sure it would free up lots of other calculations that need to be made for bones.
I’m no expert on bone verses vertex animation, but just thinking “outside the box” it seems like a good idea
Correct me if I’m wrong and let me know what the technical infeasibility is, ( if any)
I actually started playing with this a few months back, you can probably find that work in the source somewhere! The problem I ran into was that FBX point cache support does not include normal information, which would have made it less useful for animating meshes. The other big challenge would be compressing all that data after you import it
Wow, really James
I’ll get my code man to have a look.
I’m assuming then that point cache is difficult to compress? I’m going to drop a request into Autodesk about adding normal info in FBX, ( I pay them god knows how much cash every year for their software :D) …
Funny thing is, if you 7-zip an FBX file containing point cache data, (or bog standard animation) it dramatically shrinks the file size. So something in 7-zip’s algorithm manages to compress that data with no visible loss of performance on the animation side, once decompressed. It doesn’t work with windows zip though, as the file size stays almost the same.
Has this been solved yet? I have the same issue.
Also, I would like to formally request (probably a better place to request something in a ‘formal’ way, but…) support for Alembic files. Best format for geometry caching, fast, small files, etc, and saves out all the info you would need. This seems to make the most sense for anyone moving assets from DCC apps like Softimage, C4D, Max, Maya, etc.
I would suggest checking out this thread I created ages back which mentions Alembic files and a ton of other features I am requesting be added into UE4 and which might very much interest the animators in the crowd
I believe with my suggestions + the release of Sequencer (replacement to UE4 Matinee) being sometime in 2015, Epic Games can truly start to draw in the CGI/film crowd to compete with in-engine tools such as Source Filmmaker and CryENGINE CineBox.
Also if you could please provide some feedback/suggestions of your own in that thread that would be awesome
[HR][/HR] EDIT: I forgot to mention that there is an Alembic Importer Plugin currently in development which might be of interest to you, though keep in mind that the plugin has not been released yet
LFleming, anyone, really need a proper workflow importing alembic based characters into UE4. Heres the situation. Ive got a character fully animated with cloth…need to get that into unreal with materials intact and correct uvs. Also it would be nice to just replace the alembic cached animation on the imported mesh with a new one when necessary so the entire character doesnt need to be re-imported. Hope my request isnt confusing. Thanks.
