I am about to use a script I developed to import a baked particle instance animation in Maya into Unreal but the problem is that it has almost 100 meshes to animate. I don’t want to have to drag and drop each animation onto the relevant geometry. This is the sort of thing I’ll be doing (with more interesting meshes/animation, obviously):
Also, is there a way to always have geo dropped into 0,0,0? I have to reset the translation for everything that’s added to the scene because it tries to be helpful by placing them under the cursor.
Hello,
indeed you can bring over a particle simulation as baked meshes into Unreal Engine. It’s great you are writing a set of scripts to do this. To answer your questions, you should not have to import each baked mesh separately or assign their animation one at a time. Here are the correct steps using Maya:
Bake the animation of each mesh to keys (using Maya’s edit>bake keys>simulation)
Group all the meshes that you wish to export (using Maya’s edit>Group )
Select the goup and meshes and export as FBX with animation
In UE4, import the FBX. Set radio button to ‘skeletal mesh’, check ‘import animation’ and check ‘import rigid mesh’. This last checbox is critical! It will ask UE4 to create the skeletal rig for you on import!
Now you should have a single animation sequence, skeleton and skeletal mesh representing for all your baked animated meshes!
Note: you no longer have to create your skeletal mesh rig in Maya if you’re importing non-deforming meshes into UE4.
