Exporting/Importing Skeleton-less animations from Maya

[RicSousa27]

Greetings, everyone.

I’m currently producing a Roller platformer game, where we control a ball that goes through paths composed by platforms.

One of those platform I’m going to implement in the game is a Water Wheel, composed by 4 plain platforms. The idea here is to make the wheel structure rotate 360º in the x axis, and those plain platforms always be plain.

For that, I’ve both constructed the mesh in Maya, and done the animations required for that effect, only by creating key frames and giving the designed rotations.

But now I’m having some trouble exporting the mesh with the animations I’ve done. Even if I import the .fbx file as skeleton, there’s no animation, and the skeleton is “composed” by the objects used in the wheel, with no animation attached. And if I deselect the fbx as skeleton, only the mesh is imported.

Is there a way to export/import the boneless animation I’ve done? Or is it mandatory to always use skeletons, even if not for humane/animal models?

[anonymous_user_2ed5b4c7]

Hi!

Since version 4.6 you can import animated objects like skeletal meshes. But keep in mind - if you want to get the correct animation, you must resampling the all animations. When exporting animation with 360 rotation without resampling, UE4 will clamp all values to zero.

This is a simple scene with a rotating box.

The scene is exported without resampling:

The scene is exported with resampling:

[RicSousa27]

I see. In fact, I did manage to export the model with the rotating animation, and it did replicate it in UE4 as I created in Maya.

The only thing is that this seems only to work within meshes you will not need to be collided by an Actor, as I noticed that it is impossible to create colliders without a proper skeleton.