So I’ve been really scratching my head over this for the past day or so now. I’ve got a rigged book that I purchased from TurboSquid that uses the Morpher modifier to animate the page turning. However, when I export the FBX file (with all of the required settings checked that the Unreal Engine documentation states should be checked for exporting Morph animations) and import it into UE4, the animation of the page turning isn’t right at all. I don’t really understand what’s going on and how to go about fixing it, as I’m not too experienced with the Morph modifier. Below is a short video I made showing my export and import process and what the animation should look like in 3ds Max and then what it looks like in UE4.
If someone could lead me in the right direction on how to fix this, I’d greatly appreciate it, as it’s proving to be pretty difficult to find much information on this topic on my own.
The thing about morph targets is they can only be animated from point A to point B and can not curve, rotate, around the local transform. The reason it works in 3ds Max is because the animated targets uses a series of progressive targets to fake the pages turning as a percentage of the total animated sequence. Example at 25% the progression is 100% of that target and at 50% is at 100% of the next target with in the progression.
It won’t export to into Unreal 4 as although FBX might support morph progression I doubt Unreal 4 does.
All is not lost though.
If you look inside the Morph modifier you should see the progression section that holds the target and at what % it is at 100% and you can harvest it as a singular target with in it’s own morph channel. You can then reanimate the progression as a additive progression rather than a single channel progression and then when exported as a mesh asset with baked animation it should then import into Unreal 4 with the animation intact.
Another case where point cache data would be a better option {nudge nudge wink wink}
Thanks for your reply, Frankie, but I’m still a little lost as to what your solution is. For your first suggestion, do you mean just deleting the other morph channels and exporting only the one that I want with the baked animation? Also, with the point cache data modifier, how do I import those .xml files into Unreal Engine 4 so they’re recognized? If you could dumb down the explanation for a noobie like myself that would be fantastic! hahah
Well if you could post the Max file I could fix it for you. Be faster in the long run but you can try following along.
1: Make a non-instanced copy of the morph object.
2: Add a new morph modifier to the stack (delete the old one first)
3: Select a clean channel and give the original a new name like “Page 1”
4: With the new copy and morph selected click select target and copy the “Page 1” target into the clean channel.
4A: With auto key set the spinner to 100%
5: Bump the time line up 1 frame and rename the original to something like “Page 2”
6: In a new channel click select target and copy the “Page 2” target into the clean channel.
6A; Set the animation spinner of page 1 to 0 and the spinner for Page 2 to 100%
Repeat the process for the entire progressive animation and if it’s 30 frames long you should have 30 channels all animated with in the morph modifier. When Imported you should then have 30 morph shapes and should step play from page 1 to page 30.
What you might have to do once you have all of the tracks done is add an animated key frame of zero to all of the non-active targets to prevent ripple.
P.S. One could cheat point cache data the same way.
Old post, but (afaik) UE4 STILL doesn’t support progressive morphs, (even though fbx and Unity do!) Please tell me that has been added lol
My question: though I fully understand what you describe above, What does that get you in Unreal? Once you do that, what do you do in UE4 to make use of it? It seems to be little more than a layered keyframe cake, not a usable tool or slider?
Isn’t there a way, to just pull in like normal, (for instance) 5 progressive morph targets, but not AS progressive just on separate channels (like normal separate channels) , then use blueprints to ‘perform’ a ‘sequence’ of ‘triggering’ morph targets when a Trigger or ‘slider’ at 20 percent, morph channel 1 at 100 percent, when it is at 40% morph channel 2 at 100 % when at 60%, morph channel 3 is at 100% etc etc… Could you maybe help me flesh this idea out a bit? Sort of like, ‘forcing the issue’ with BP, and treating the in-betweens as individual morphs!
