Hi all,
I’m creating an animated scene in Cinema 4D and importing to Unreal Engine 5.3 via Datasmith. The animations are simple keyframe PSR animations to show buildings growing, roads lifting up, or trees dropping into place etc.
Everything is working fine in C4D. When imported via Datasmith and played back in Unreal via the sequencer however, some of the elements seem to “continue” animating - either growing endlessly, lifting endlessly, or dropping endlessly.
This behaviour is arbitrary, and for each attempted export/import where one works, in another import it won’t.
Troubleshooting things I’ve tried:
EXPORTING/IMPORTING:
-The whole scene as one animation, played as one subsequence
-Some elements grouped, and stacking as subsequences
-Each element individually, and stacking as subsequences
-The whole scene but only half the timeline
-As regular animation, instead of geometry cache
C4D
-Copying and pasting into completely new file
-Changing instance types from instance to multiinstance
UNREAL:
-Double clicking the subsequence track, right clicking animation > properties > keep state
-Creating Sequences in different ways - via top dropdown menu, double clicking an animation etc.
-Importing into new Unreal project
FILE INFO:
-Total project animation length is 3840 frames / 2:08 minutes
-Animations are mostly created using plain effectors with fields for position/scale, or keyframing visibility.
OBSERVATIONS:
-Sometimes in the editor window the behaviour will change slightly with each different scrub through. The render will always render the exact same incorrect animations though.
-Sometimes an element (building, road etc.) will work when part of an imported group, and then when part of a different group that same element won’t work.
-If an imported Datasmith element works, it will work in different Unreal projects
-The best success was once I managed to import the entire thing with everything working. Unfortunately the animation since changed so that file is no longer of use.
-Not sure if relevant as I’ve read that Unreal isn’t particularly strong at importing animations, but the whole scene takes approx. 5 hours for datasmith to import, with proportionally shorter times for smaller grouped elements
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have been trying to solve this for a couple weeks now and am hoping to resolve soon!