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Static Meshes with animation?

Development Discussion Animation
#1

I’m not exactly sure what you would call this, since static meshes should be… well, static.

The meshes I want to animate aren’t really characters, and having tons of simple skeletons seems odd.

So what if I want to animate, say a prop of a helicopter, or a spinning fan, or say a chest opening. Is this possible in Unreal, because everything seems to be attached to a skeleton?

Do I need to look into morph targets? If so, are there any good tutorials on that (I’m using Maya) that You could link me to?
I feel like morph targets would be okay for say a chest opening, but do they work for looping things, like a prop spinning?

#2

You could build in chunks and animate via blueprint.

#3

you must put your object into a hierarchy like :

Root_LOC
…Chest_Bottom_GEO
…Chest_Top_LOC
…Chest_Top_GEO

Loc = locator

and then animate you “chest_top_loc” and export it to UE with the proper fbx parameters.
You select the “FBX Meshes and animations” for the file type
and check :" Import as Skeletal"

It should work fine…

I do have a issue with the imported file. the pivot point of the animation is offset from the one in Maya. so, the animation do not works fine…
If anyone knows something :stuck_out_tongue:

#4

Thanks guys. The Blueprint one worked fine. I still want to get Kalths version though!

I keep having this issue though, when I go to import it and click import skeleton. It wan’t me to select a skeleton like it’s some sort of animation, and I can’t select the mesh. I’ve tried exporting the file many different ways but nothing seems to work. When I messed around with this yesterday I actually got it to work once, but I just couldn’t recreate it. Here’s the thing to, it was with the same exact file! Do you think you could give an example of what might export settings have to be??

Import to Unreal; No option to import Mesh?!?!

Maya FBX Export Settings (Closed the tabs not in use)

Thanks again!