Character’s mesh and animation are exported out from UE4 and cloth simulations are (alembic) cached out from Maya 2017. Upon exporting from Maya, which behaves naturally according to the movements of the character animations and importing into UE4 is what causes the problem. The cached file goes bonkers and does not behave the same. Works perfectly in Maya, but not in UE4…not sure why…
Have you been able to get other Alembic caches export from Maya, import into UE4 and play correctly? Are you using the ‘SkeletalMesh’ (PCA) import pipeline for Alembic? Could you give a bit more info about how it ‘goes bonkers’? Is the geometry degenerate?
Hey James, I am working on this problem with Elemental Labs and can fill in some information on the issue. I previously added a question on the subject that you can find here, but I’ll fill in more details on this post.
We were able to import other alembic caches from Maya previously but new files I’ve been given by our technical artist all seem to have this problem. We are importing the .abc files as a Skeletal Mesh and you can see the import settings here
Once imported, I find that the cloth has strange transforms. A prime example is the first frame of the animation, when viewing the cloth inside of Maya vs inside of Unreal.
Maya v Unreal (I’ve added a sphere to both scenes to show the world location of the cloth)
As you can see, the location inside of Maya correctly lines up with our character. However, once in Unreal its much closer to the origin and animates incorrectly. I’ve double checked my Maya to ensure I don’t have a different unit scale but it seems all to be fine. The cloth itself also has some strange artifacts and looks incorrect as opposed to the maya file.
I was hopeful that the issue would be an error on my end but I unfortunately I cannot find a reason why our old cloth would import right while these files will not.
I’d be happy to send you a cloth file if that would help! Let me know, thanks!