Hi everyone,
I would like to use UE4 for Film/TV production, and I wondering if it is possible to bake animations on to the vertices of a mesh rather then relying on a bone rig?
The problem we’re facing is that we use complex rigs for our animators to use, some of which are not really relying on a conventional bone rig system. Since it would be very difficult for us to convert and bake everything down to a simpler bone rig setup, I am wondering if it is possible to bake down the animations on to the vertices.
I am aware of morph targets, and one idea we had was to bake every key frame into separate morph targets/blend shape, however we’re wondering if there is a better way to do it that is possible with UE4.
Thanks,
Yurie
Hello,
We do have a plan to support vertex animation, which is what you’re working for.
As a workaround, what you described about making morphtarget for every frame also works, but it will be a lot of memory + CPU time, but considering you’re outputting to the video, this might not be a bad solution.
There is still one issue that will be resolved in future FBX that animated normal isn’t imported, so you’ll have to use generated normal.
Our vertex animation needs two major works. One is to change our importing pipeline to get vertex cache directly from FBX, and second is to support compression. If you don’t care any of this, we have work-in-progress code in placed. There is no support yet until we follow up with the above tasks, but it is planned.
Thanks,
–Lina,
Awesome, that is good to hear. Thank you for clearing this up. Is there any eta on when this feature will available for us?
We expect possibly late next year. AFAIK, the FBX feature will be added in the 2014 FBX, and when that’s added, we can add extended feature.
Until then, you can probably use morph target animation.
Thanks,
–Lina,
Hello Yurie,
Firstly, have you attempted to import your skeletal system into the Rocket editor? If yes, what are the particular issues you came across?
I have requested one of our animation specialists to provide more insight into the matter, but I do believe it would be best to address any skeletal issues you may be having.
Well the problem does not lay with the editor it self, the problem is that a lot of our rigs do not rely on a conventional method of animating via bones which is something that game engines have not yet really embraced.
So for example we have a custom rig that would use soft selections to create and control waves on an ocean mesh which means that there are no bones being used, and using bones to serve that purpose would be very inefficient as that would require thousands of bones.
This is just one example, there are many other cases where we would use more complex rigs in maya, and because we simply render out of maya it really does not matter how we setup our rigs. But trying to use those rigs with a game engine does not really work. So what we are trying to do is trying to remove the reliance of bone rigs all together, and simply bake out the animations of the vertices. Ultimately it is a matter of trying to avoid changing the pipeline too much.
We are looking for a way to pull this off in the game engine, and at the moment we’re looking into morph targets, so I am curious if there is a better way to do this?
Have you looked into world position offset in the material editor? It is good for this kind of animations.
To developers: Did you guys look at alembic at all? It seems it would be easier to use for baked vertex animations than fbx.