Geometry Cache out of Experimental state for 4.24?

General Feedback & Requests
1

Hi Epic team
Could you please let me know what’s the status of the Geometry Cache option of the Alembic Cache Import menu is?
It still says (Experimental) but I couldn’t find anything wrong with it in my user cases (although these were quite simple).

Does anybody know what are the limitations of this feature?

Thanks

2

My experience since a few months ago on a project (not a game):

1 - Limited to a certain file size

2 - Highly unstable

3 - Slow feedback and if you have a few of them in the scene can bring the editor/sequencer to a crawl.

4 - Issues with motion blur and velocity channels.

5 - I can’t imagine it being used in a game unless the object cache in question is of a very limited optimized size and length.

Personal take: For an engine that advertises itself for VFX use, in comparison to Unity’s geometry caches implementation it is very very poorly implemented here.

  • We dropped UE4 switched engines to meet expectations and schedule for the project.
3

They also tend to lose all their data if you move the asset or update to new engine version. You need to reimport all of them everytime but that is not unexpected from experimental feature.

4

Thanks for your input! It seems to be indeed still very experimental.

It would be great if one of the Epic developers could give us an update on the status of this feature.

5

Hi all,
I would love to get a final confirmation about the status of this feature.
a) Is it still being developed?
b) Is it being replaced?

​​​​​​​Thanks

6

Imo I don’t think they are going to remove it because in 4.24 they added raytracing support for it.

7

That would be great as, even though it’s experimental, it’s still the most reliable method of importing animated geometry caches.
The official method, using skeletal meshes, has a massive bug creating normals seams:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/deve…88#post1694988