Is Cinematic animation pipeline between UE4 and Maya possible?

Development Asset Creation
1

Hi,

I am currently working on a project which requires animation interchange between UE4 and Maya, and I am really failing to figure out how Epic manages to pull of cinematics with UE4 since to me, it appears the toolset it just not there.

The issue we are having is that there is no acceptable way of outputting data from UE4 in any reasonable way. Here are several examples:

  1. We had a door animated in UE4, and we wanted to animate a character actually grabbing the door handle and opening the door. We have exported the FBX out of sequencer, and the animator animated the character grabbing the door handle along the exported motion. The nasty surprise came when the animation turned out not match. The Sequencer FBX export does NOT export ANY animation tangents at all. All the interpolation between keys is completely flat. On top of that, sequencer FBX export does not support baking of keyframes in any way. This means that any animation done inside UE4 which includes keys with interpolation any other than linear can NOT be exported.

  2. Exporting the scene in FBX via the File menu does not export any Sequencer animation at all, therefore the scene is completely static. The only way to export the FBX is through the Sequencer FBX export. This is “all or nothing” export. The exporter tooltip says that it either exports entire scene, if no objects are selected, or selected objects. That is NOT the case. When objects are selected, it exports only those which have added tracks in the current sequence. This means that to correctly export moving scene for an animator, the only way is to export the WHOLE scene. The problem here is that it exports literally everything, including every single piece of painted instanced foliage. Our scene has foliage so the FBX file contains so many objects it crashes Maya on any attempt of FBX import.

I really struggle to figure out any feasible workflow. If we assemble the scene in UE4, we can only reliably send static scene back to Maya for animators’ reference, no animation at all, since there is no way to correctly export keyframes. This means that the animation can only be authored in Maya, but then, when importing stuff back from Maya, it appears that even the most rudimentary things like opening doors would have to be set up as skeletal meshes, with all the limitations and issues with them being used for simple transform animation. Only other way would be constantly reimporting the door as FBX scene, having to manually place it in scene and reapply all the properties every single time the animation is updated. This whole workflow just does not make any sense…

2

I would say that it probably works best to animate the door within Maya. Yes, you’d need to import it as a skeletal mesh, but you don’t need to rig it with bones, you can still animate it like normal, it just can’t have skinned animation mixed with rigid body animation in the same skeletal mesh.

3

Missed matched curves is a common problem when moving animations between platforms so moving animations between Maya and Unreal 4 is rather normal and not unique to the application.

The most common work around when using an application for cinematic use is to bake the key frames which will convert the curves to pose-to-pose animation

The other option is to rebuild the curves by hand once imported into UE4.

4

Epic just release today at the Marketplace Maya Livelink and Modo Livelink btw.