I made an animation of a character singing in 3ds Max. The character is fully rigged and works inside UE4 as expected. However, I used keyframe animation of my character’s morphs to make him sing. All inside Max. Now what I want is to import that animation into UE4 so I can fully animate my character’s dialogue in Max and then transfer to UE4.
I was disappointed to find out that my perfectly synced singing in 3ds Max, will remain in 3ds Max. So what is the workflow? Are we supposed to animate dialogue strictly inside Unreal? I know I can use morphs in it, but it’s not what I need. I need to be able to fully animate in 3ds Max and import it in UE4 as I can do with regular animations. I can make my character run in 3ds Max and have that animation in UE. Isn’t it possible with keyframed animations of morphs too?
One of my attempts ended up with my animation importing as a skeletal mesh and my morph animations still nowhere to be found. What am I doing wrong??
A little update. I saw a tip in a forum somewhere. In 3ds Max, we skin the model and then move on to make the morphs right? WRONG.
There is a bug that won’t export morph animations unless the skin modifier is added AFTER morph. This is not about their order in the modifier stack, it’s about the moment you ACTUALLY add the modifier. So you get the picture. You have to copy/save your skin information, delete it (it would be good if you deleted the morph too but that’s up to your testing), and then add first the morph, then the skin. I managed to get my animation to Unreal this way.
The morph animation will import as a separate skeletal mesh so I plan to use it as a replacement for my actual character’s skeletal mesh, then go back to the original after the animation has played.
UPDATE: Another thing! I realized the bug was not my only problem. Be careful. When you make a character and want to have bone animations and morph animations, you have to first export the Skeletal Mesh WITH morphs selected. I did the mistake to first export my character to unreal and then make morphs. But if the first export does not have the morph targets in it, only the bones will animate and not the morphs. That way I was able to import the animation as an animation file (green) and not a new skeletal mesh.