I’ve been searching for some hours now and no closer really to understanding whether something we’re trying to do is possible.
What with Sequencer, and now tools like Composure, and the movements UE4 is making into virtual production, I feel like this might be possible, but perhaps we’re also asking too much of something not designed for the task.
I’ll describe a slightly scaled down version of what we’re trying to achieve. Essentially we want to have a packaged game (since this needs to be part of an autonomous pipeline) which is always running. While running it is watching a folder, and when new data appears in the folder, the game picks it up and ingests it. The data will consist of a video file, and a .csv file containing a vector position for every frame of the video. These positions form an animated path, and so in UE4 a particle system is attached to an object following that path. The output of this particle system travelling along this path is comped on top of the input video. Suppose the video is a ball bouncing, and the position data is the location of the ball in each frame, what we now have is a comped video with a stream of particles emanating from the bouncing ball (however crudely). At this point, the comped video is output to file.
The process of this seems feasible to put together manually in the editor, but I’m having trouble figuring out whether this is something achievable from a packaged game. Both Sequencer and Composure (in terms of their abilities to actually export video to file) seem like things you use in the editor - or am I wrong about that?
Is there any way to achieve something like this in Unreal Engine? The other avenue I’m currently exploring is scripting After Effects, which certainly seems slightly more suited to this task, but I would prefer to do it in UE4 if possible.