Hey all,
I’m looking for a quick way to cycle through the visibility of a couple hundred objects. Since there isn’t an Alembic plugin yet, my thought is to load in a ton of static meshes and trigger visibility on them, either with a “tick” or setting uo a “timeline.”
I just don’t know the way to go about, or how to efficiently do it for hundreds of objects. I did se a post about animating scale on the objects in Max or Maya and exporting an FBX with that animation since visibility doesn’t come through. I jst don’t know how efficient that will be.
I did think that maybe there is a way I can create a construction blueprint that generates an array of timelines connected to an array of static meshes.
Anyway, I’m just looking for ideas and examples.
Many thanks,
As RimmyD said, tell us what are you trying to accomplish in a little more detail and we might be able to point you in a better direction.
As for swapping meshes, you could create a class with StaticMeshComponent and an Array of StaticMeshes, then cycle through them and apply by using SetStaticMesh function/node on the SM Component.
I have a point cloud per frame. I have converted it into a volume and created a curve that randomly runs through the intersecting voxels, and that curve is extruded into a tube and converted to a poly mesh per frame.
The end result is supposed to look like a sketch, but in 3d.
Since the point order is all over the map I can’t blendshape it, the edge/face connections are maintained.
My idea is to cycle through the objects. I’m a UE4 novice so I’m not up on all the nodes. I did a matinee test and it seems to give the best results with the visibility track, but it’ll kill me to set up 1200 groups and tracks and 2400 keys by hand. I’m hoping the matinee data is written to an ascii file, and I could write a quick python script to generate it. I just haven’t found where in the project it lives.
The setStaticMesh node sounds like a great way to go. Any way to generate the array without clicking down 1200 pins? I think building the array and adding the objs is as bad as manually doing it in matinee.
The Houdini Engine was my first option, but the alembic plugin only deals with a single static mesh, making it useless.
In short, I want to render a 5000 cv tube per frame.
I’m pretty new to UE4, but I can get around ok. My background is in VFX, and I get by in a couple other game engines. But I’m looking for a simple solution over a complex but elegant/efficient one.
I think i got ya now. To narrow it down one more time, let me say what i think you want to do and let me know where i am off!
You have a series of point clouds that you want to display one after another. (Like a point cloud per “frame” of a puff of smoke dispersing). You want to transition in real time through each “frame”/cloud to make an animation?
If you’re not afraid of C++ you could use Asset Registry to get the list of Static Meshes you want and fill the array that way. I recommend you also read Jamie’s notes on using the registry here.
Mostly, I do have a mesh per frame that I would like to render. (lighting, shadows, etc) so it’s more structured than just a point cloud, but yes. one mesh per frame, 30 frames per second.
Afraid? “no.” Capable of doing it in my timeframe? most likely “no.”
…but I’ll take a look into it. I’ll most likely being redoing this project again as a learning exercise, again.
Toggling mesh visibility is simple but binary. It seems it would be easy to just cache references to your meshes and set them to hidden/visible each second using a delay/timer/timeline. Is there an aspect of this you are not sure of specifically?
