Importing Vertex deformation into Unreal via Datasmith? Any Plans?

hey there,

Does anyone know if there are any plans to enable datasmith to export animated shapes (vertex deformation, skin, blendshapes, anything)?

We use Unreal for linear content creation and are facing some challenges importing animated particles from 3ds max. It works very well when particles only have ther PSR simulated:
Even with very hipoly particle meshes, only ONE instance per shape gets exported and then all the other particles are spawned via datasmith and animated via sequence.
That enables very small file sizes and also enables us to utilize nanite or even completely exchange the particle meshes in Unreal.

For particles with looping animations (birds, fish etc), it might be possible to find a workaround were we just replace the static exported mesh in Unreal Engine with an animated mesh via blueprint and then randomly offset the animation per blueprint as well (although thats above my skills with blueprint).

But if the particles are animated shapes, that are triggered differently at certain frames in the timeline, we currently only have a very clunky workaround:

  1. Export particles as objects via Datasmith, but only with PSR animation.
  2. Import animated object via skeletalmesh/alembic.
  3. Manually copy and align each animated shape to its correspondend datasmith exported shape in the level and parent it to that.
  4. Manually add each animated shape to the sequencer and manually sync the animation.
  5. Hide the datasmith particles.

It works if you have only a few particles, but with more particles it gets pretty tedious.

Exporting the whole particle animation as alembic isn´t feasible, because each particle shape is already pretty hipoly.

I don´t have the time to learn niagara and I don´t even know if it would be capable to use hipoly animated shapes (when exported as alembic or with skeletal meshes).

We thought about using vertex animation texture, but then we´d have the same issue: How do we sync it from data we could export via datasmith?

I´m guessing there is no out of the box solution for this as of yet, but if anyone has some ideas, feel free to pitch them and ping me pls…:slight_smile:

I also started looking into USD, so maybe that is the future instead of focusing on datasmith.

Its one of the last few hurdles to completely move our pipeline to Unreal for rendering/shading and cene assembly…