[Solved] Importing Skin Cluster Animation

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hey,
So I’ve rigged a character in Maya and I’ve imported it all fine and dandy into UE4 with the animations and stuff. Only issue I have is that none of the facial animations are working as I’ve used animated Skin Clusters in Maya rather than Joints. The only way that seems to work is if I bake the control points, but that’s extremely taxing.

When I’ve tried to import it (without baking control points) - it first won’t allow me because I have more than one Root. So I grouped the Skin Cluster Handles and parented them under the Root Joint. It imports into UE4 however my hands go all weirdly deformed and my character blinking (Blinking is the facial animation I’m trying to get to work), doesn’t really work.

So my question is, is there a way to succeffully import animated skin cluster handles into UE4? If not, how do you advise to rig a face to be imported into UE4?

2

Hi!

  1. UE4 do not import skin animation. UE4 import a Skeletal animation. Before export animation from MAYA, all you need, as bake animation to skeleton and delete rig. Scene should contain only skeleton and skinned mesh. No locators, no constraints, no scripts, no groups or other nodes in a top hierarchy.
  2. If you want add a different animations for different part of the skeleton, in UE4 you should use an Animation Montage. With an Animation Montage you can combine a facial animations with any character animation. This is a video tutorial about Animation Montage and how it use
3

Thanks a lot for clarifying, worked my way around it. Just changed the rig and added joints in. Thanks for your help