Can’t figure this one out.
[video]CinemaCamBug - YouTube
Any help would be appreciated.
Can’t tell for sure what’s happening here, but it looks like it’s not a clipping problem. Because clipping plane, well it’s a plane. So it should cut every thing with a plane on certain distance. But in your case it’s not. The ground remain visible and character disappear instantly. It’s not how clipping plane works. It’s more like cooling problem. Did you somehow change character size? Or it’s bounding box? May be your character are moved with bones instead of moving actor? Whatever reason is, most likely the bounding box of a character falls off the camera frustum. You should look in that direction.
@Demnus is right, and here is a little help to test this.
Engine - Rendering - Culling -> Occlusion Culling. Turn this off to check to see if the culling is what makes it disappear. If so you can begin to investigate the reasons why, but don’t forget to turn back on!
Eg. in the static mesh editor window, enable the “Bounds” at the top bar to see what are the boundaries of the mesh will use for occlusion culling for instance. When you open the Static Mesh Settings at the details panel the Positive/Negative bounds will help you to extend this boundary that should help you to avoid this culling issue. The bounds should cover the mesh as much as possible.
There also is a console command called ‘r.HZBOcclusion 1’ which is disabled by default but you can enable it by using this command to support a more accurate culling for a little extra price on the gpu. This is not neccessary but can come handy sometimes, especially with movie sequences to avoid some culling artifacts.
Well actually good point. And you are right it has nothing to do with clipping. I should have tested more. It is an Alembic import. And I have not done anything with the scale or bounds. But it is definitely the character as it relates to being captured by a camera. Just have no idea where to start fixing it. None of the bounds settings seem to do anything.
Occlusion Culling on/off does nothing.
Here is a link to some Alembic files. Real simple light-weight mesh. Files are not very large at all.
In order to work inside the Sequencer they need to be imported as Skeletal Meshes. And it will make Blend Shapes out of the cache data. Importing as a cache file does not work in Sequencer. And then just like with Skeletal meshes you must select the animation to play in it. You can set that up in Sequencer.
It does not seem to be culling. But I am not really an Unreal expert just yet. If anyone wants to play with this and see if maybe it can work for you. Could be something on my end.
Much appreciated.
Tested it, and yes it is indeed the culling bounds that does not seem to move with the animated mesh, therefore culling will remove the mesh from the scene when the bound gets out of the viewport. It also have nothing to do with the cinecam either.
You can also turn this box on to be visible in the editor viewport, just enable in the Show - Advanced - Bounds and you can inspect it.
So i’ve been playing around and found that you can extend these bounds of the mesh, so the culling won’t remove it from the scene, but i doubt it is how it should work, since you would make a bound that is compatible with all animatons sequences and that not seem to be a good idea. Engine should be able to cull the mesh when it’s get out of the viewport, it is a scene optimization to keep the realtime rendering performance at high. Extending the bounds just corrupts this, and you will eventually run out of gpu juice with a complete scenery.
The bounds should follow the animation, but i’m not sure how to make it to do that in the editor. This probably should be edited in 3ds max.
Cool man. That fixed it. Thanks for taking the time! Adjusting the bounds works for me because I will just do that for each animation if needed. It only has to work for a cinematic. one shot at a time. No game play needed. Much appreciated!
Going to add more information here. I found this can also happen with a character when you import fbx and there is a root bone. For game animations you might want this because you would be looping and translating the bounds which is tied to the root so it seems. In this case, if the animation moves but the root stays in the same place, the character moves out of the bounds and will disappear. One solution would be to simply have nothing named Root in the hierarchy.