IClone8 Animations to UE5.7

Distribution Game Production
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Hello Everyone,

I am a CC5 / Iclone8 user. I am able to export my characters along with animations attached to it since a few months now with no issues…until now.

I started noticing that the animation file sizes were enormous (200MB, 600MB, etc…)

The length of the animations are not very long, maybe 5-6 seconds. I have tried just about every setting I could think of from CC5/Iclone8 to reduce the sizes, but no matter what I do, that file size just seems to never shrink.

If anyone has any useful tutorials to share on the subject, it would be greatly apprecaited, thank you.

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A 5-6 second skeletal clip is normally a few MB, even with a CC body and face. 200-600 MB means the FBX still contains the character, not just the motion. iClone’s default FBX export embeds the mesh, clothing, hair, and often the full morph set in every take.

On the iClone side:

  • Export animation only. If the character is already in UE from the Character Creator auto-setup, turn off mesh, textures, and embedded media. Do not export the body as Alembic or a point cache. That is the other way a short clip lands in the hundreds of MB.
  • Split body and face. The HD face profile writes a large blendshape set into the file even for a short move. If you only need the body, leave facial morphs out of that export.
  • 30 fps is enough. A key on every bone and every morph at 60 or 120, plus the mesh, is what blows the file up.
  • Open the FBX before it hits UE. If a viewer shows a mesh in that file, the size is the mesh. An animation-only FBX of this length should be well under 20 MB.

On import:

  • Import as animation onto the skeleton you already have, with Import Mesh off.
  • Enable Remove Redundant Keys.
  • After import, set a compression scheme on the Anim Sequence and save. That is what shrinks the uasset. The FBX size and the uasset size are different. If the uasset is still huge after an animation-only import, the clip has curves for hundreds of morphs. Delete the unused morph curves, or re-export without them.

The split that stays small: one CC import for the skeletal mesh, then one FBX per move that is curves only. Re-exporting the mesh with every animation is what makes a 6 second idle look like a 600 MB file.