I was wondering which software you guys prefer for animations?.. ive tried blender, maya, motionbuilder, and daz3d… i was considering trying out 3DS… but they all seem to have issues importing meshes and animations from UE4 making it difficult to edit and tweak animations… so which ones work best for UE4, and what do you prefer?
In my experience Maya has been working best with UE4. But I say that because I had built a maya character animation pipeline long before I started working with UE4. Making the upgrade to make it work for UE4 didnt take too long either.
I think in the end any software can work best if you invest proper time into making it happen.
in all the software i tested, maya seemed to work the best able to import bones in the correct orientation, and the skeleton not coming out all funky looking, animations playing correctly that are imported into maya… but, im just using a trial, not sure i want to invest in software that is $150 monthly… it’d be nice if i could get blender to work properly with it, trying to import the UE4 mannequin and various animations to make tweaks just doesnt seem to work very well, and it’d appear daz3d doesnt really work with .fbx at all which to my knowledge is really all that works with UE4… i may try poser and see how that works
I am mostly using DAZ mostly because I just can’t wrap my head around 3DS. I recently came across a plugin here called “allright” (or similar) which allows basically to do in UE what you can do in DAZ, haven’t checked it out yet but it sounds promising. If you’re not into super sophisticated stuff, this may be right for you.
have you ever been able to successfully import existing FBX animations into daz?
Maya. It’s what works the best with unreal (and amazing software if you can stomach the daily crashes), never had issues importing anything animated/rigged inside the engine with it.
im thinking UE is probably built around maya, thats what it seems like to me… is this just a UE thing, or do most gaming engines just have one or two programs they actually work with?.. and can UE use any other formats besides FBX?
heres what i want to do specifically… im using the animation starter pack, it has most the animations i need, and i know i can make some still poses to use for aim off-sets so i can get my normal pointing, and ADS animations… but what i really want to do is take some of the animations and import them into an animation program, then find where the keyframes are for the animation and tweak them to make new animations to fill in the gaps where the animation starter pack falls short… the animation starter pack desperately needs a forward-left and a backwards-right animation
Not an expert, but I do know some games primarily use 3ds Max and related tools instead of Maya.
I don’t think UE4 directly imports anything except FBX.
That should be possible with any DCC that includes animation and animation layers. Obviously Maya is one, but I’m pretty sure Blender and Max and C4D would be able to, as well.
As an pro animator once told me:
“For Animation, to get the job done…
Studio Max is like an Audi.
Maya is a Ferrari;
MotionBuilder is a War Tank,
and Blender is a Chevrolet/Honda.”
[USER=“434”][/USER] I think of blender as a swiss army knife I’ve had all my life. Maya/motion Builder is pretty good. I like Modo, but I dont own a license. Akeytsu looks like its been coming along. Maya is great for animations. I just feel like I go back and forth polishing maya up too much where I can get things right with Blender most everytime. Idk why? Something wierd about Maya where Things are productive, but then I find some things counter productive. I keep going back in too edit so many little things in Maya.
i wanted to like blender, i really did, but, i dont know… its not very user friendly, and yeah, i know most the shortcuts and it still really isnt all that user friendly, i think its too customizable and does too much that it really only becomes a jack of all trades and a master of none of them… they try taking on too much and making it do more than what most people would ever consider using it for… like ffs, a gaming engine? really? and how much of the market share did they expect to wrestle away from polished gaming engines like unreal, unity, or cryengine?
personally, i think ive settled on maya… why maya?.. because it does what i need it to do well by not focusing on developing a bunch of features i’ll never want, need, or use and pretty much sticks to 3D modeling an animation, has a polished user friendly UI, and works flawlessly with unreal, its a good program, and i am already familiar with autodesk products, as primarily a mechanical engineer i’m very familiar with inventor