I have successfully imported my skeletal mesh with morph targets, I can successfully alter them in the morph target preview and see the mesh deform as it should.
I also have a keyframed blend shape (morph target) animation in Maya. I hit the play button in maya and see my characters face deform as it should.
However I cannot seem to figure out how to export that keyframed blend shape animation into UE4 in a way that works.
To export a skeletal animation I select the joints and do export selected to fbx. What’s the analagy for exporting blend shape (morph target) animation? The keyframes are tied to a blendshape node on my “head/face” mesh. I’ve tried selecting the head mesh and doing export selected but that doesn’t seem to work either.
So how do you export a keyframed blend shape animation from maya to drive the morph targets of your skeletal mesh in ue4?
I think that since blendshapes are basically vertex transformation you cannot bake the animation inside Maya ( because there’s no weighting on the face itself ), but you can keyframe them inside Persona.
Looking around I can’t find a solution to that either, so what I would suggest is to create a set of bones ( or nulls ) which will weight your mesh as standard envelping, but the actual movement is driven by the blendshapes, so that when you export the animation UE will read the animation of the face based on the bones that you created in Maya.
Its a kind of reverse animation since you’re using the bones “passively”, but you do need a mesh with bones envelopes on different regions of the face, otherwise you have to animate the blendshapes directly inside UE4.
Hopefully someone will come up saying that you can export the blendshape animation from Maya, but right now I think no one did it…not sure if its a missing feature or if its the way UE always deal with morph targets…
I believe I found the answer to my problem. Maya was renaming the blend shapes on import of the original FBX file (prefixing them with “blendshape1_”).
So my blenshape names in the skeletal mesh file wound up being different than those exported in the animation file.
Once this was resolved I was able to export the animations by selecting the joints and mesh of my character’s head with associated blend shape keyfames.
Since you have both joints and geometry in the file UE4 will default to import skeletal mesh but just manually switch to the animation import tab.