Hello!
I’m using UE4 for cinematic videos and i really love to know about custom destruction method. I saw Elemental demo and they used presimulated destruction mesh. Then i tried to export my custom destruction mesh and its kind of failed. Every piece has its own animation and bones and i got lots of stuff on my content browser. Elemental demo had only one actor with animation. I tried couple of ways to export even bone with skin is not working. Sooo what am i doing wrong? Im on 3dsmax, rayfire latest. I tried maya dmm and… i had to bake all of my chunks one by one its kinda pain in the ***. So i decided to stick with 3ds max.
aaand why did elemental demo disappeared from marketplace?
Hi Gandosh,
The Elemental Demo has been moved to the Learn Tab. This is true for some of the other projects that Epic has released as well. We found they work better as sources to learn from rather than being under the Marketplace content.
I made a tutorial in one of my forum threads that goes over importing rigid mesh animations which you can check out here: [TUTORIALS] Photons Be Free: Mini-tutorials and other curiosities - Community & Industry Discussion - Epic Developer Community Forums
I used 3Ds Max, and this technique should work with other modeling applications as well, to export my baked animation. There is no bones or skinning needed. Just a animation baked to the timeline that can be exported. The one key thing it seems like you’re missing is that all the fractured pieces need to be selected and then grouped. Then when you export you can bring it in to UE4 as a single animated rigid mesh.
I hope this helps!
Tim
Mmmm, how did I miss that thread? There are alot of small how-to’s on stuff to do exactly what I’ve been looking for.
Thanks!
thank you!
Its funny that i tried grouping these objects then export. I was still getting lots of meshes. But now its working haha. I guess i missed something there.
Man unreal engine 4 is so badass.
@SaviorNT: It probably got missed because it falls to the back pages. I don’t get time to update as much as I’d like lately. After Next week I’ll have more free time to add some more little things I’ve been wanting to do for fun outside of work. 
Feel free to add any suggestions. I have a few things I like to do for my own personal fun and learning purposes, but I do always welcome any ideas as well and if one strikes me as something I’m interested in (especially destructible type work!) feel free to let me know.
@Gandosh: I did the same thing originally as well. There is a request in to make this a bit smooth of a process when importing a rigid animation. I’m glad you’ve got it working.
Thanks for your help =D. One thing is UE4 supports Point cache kind of things? like presimulated clothes etc 
The same method here can be used for pre-simulated cloth. Perform the simulation in the timeline, and export as an animation. If I’m understanding what you’re wanting to do.
Probably an interesting tutorial would be to export/import particle effects from Max to UE4. Is this even possible? Or, to the main reason why, is to use something like FumeFX or Phoenix to create particle effects, and then export those out of Max and import into UE4.
It’s not going to work for cloth–you can export 3 types of animation to UE4—skinned meshes, animated (rigid) meshes, and morphs.
Particle FX can’t, you can render to images but that’s it. For the Infiltrator demo they rendered a FumeFX simulation to image slices and did some particle stuff with it in UE4 to make the fireball explosion.
Yeah we can export only keyframed animations. If we get point cache support… cant imagine the possibilities 
By the way how are they rendered that slice? I didn’t figured it out :P.