Importing Maya animation onto static mesh in sequencer

Development Cinematics & Media
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1

Is there a way to export an animation from Maya, and import it onto a static mesh in the sequencer to keys? Similarly to how cameras are imported from Maya. The camera animation is baked down in Maya, and imported onto the camera asset by right clicking on the camera in the sequencer, and clicking “Import”. Upon doing this with a piece of geometry, it does not work. Is there a way to make this work without importing the geometry as a skeletal mesh?

2

Skeletal mesh are the only things that can have an animation file working with it, static meshes are just static. If you make everything that’s just a mesh in maya animate under one group, and import it as a skeletal mesh, it should import with animation fine

3

Thanks for your response. I understand that static meshes are static, but they can be translated and rotated within the sequencer. A camera is also just a static object, but you can import an animation onto it in the sequencer to give it the keys from the animation. The reason why I want to try to avoid using skeletal mesh is because this is an environment animation, and I want to avoid replacing the geometry with skeletal meshes

4

you gonna have a hard time trying to do that, you could also just try to animate in sequencer, another option you can look at the ancient demo for UE5, the big robot Blueprint there has a skeletal mesh, with a construction script loop that puts all the nanite static meshes onto the right spots on the skeletal mesh

5

you can try exporting alembic cache from maya…but if it’s an environment then it might not be the best solution since it makes a copy of all the geos per frame of animation.

6

Yes you can do this.
Add your level static mesh actor to sequencer, right click on it and chose export.
take the fbx and import into maya
animate the mesh in maya
select it and do export selected
make sure you are exporting animation in the options
once you have exported to an fbx go to unreal again
right click on the mesh in sequencer and choose import
select the fbx you exported form maya
voila… keys. have fun.

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