I have an animated camera in 3D Studio. It’s a few thousand frames long and it has position and rotation keys set for every frame of the animation. I intend on rendering this animated camera in Unreal to a image sequence and then matching it with 3D renders from 3D Studio. The movements of the camera in Unreal must match EXACTLY with that of the camera in 3D Studio. My current problem is that it is not doing so.
I exported it to FBX and then tested it by importing it back into 3D Studio. The FBX is good, all the keys on every frame for every track are perfect.
In Unreal, I open the Sequencer and go to General Options → Import… I select the FBX and it creates a CineCameraActor and imports the animation into the sequencer. Most of the position keys are imported. There are several small one or two frame gaps randomly scattered about. This may not be an issue, but I don’t know why it’s doing this. The biggest problem is that the rotation tracks are almost empty! The X and Y tracks only have a couple of keys, and the Z track only has about 20% of the keys that it should.
I have looked at the Animation Compression settings in the Project Settings, thinking that these settings might have something to do with this, they are set to BitwiseCompressOnly, and the compression formats for Rotation and Translation are ACF None. I played with changing these to other values, but it does not seem to make much difference if any.
The Y and Z rotation tracks have quite a bit of rotation change throughout the entire animation. Panning up and down several times, each about 10 degrees, and then left and right almost 180 degrees worth. I would think that if there was some sort of compression or keyframe reduction going on, that there should be almost as many rotation keys as there are position keys. Rendering this camera out and compositing it with the 3D Studio renders results in the two animations drifting away from each other quite a bit. This is unacceptable.
Is there any other options for controlling how animation keys import? I’m not using this for a game, so I don’t care about how much animation data there is. Frame rate and scene performance is not an issue, I just need the camera to match the imported data.
I’ve attached the FBX. I also exported the Unreal animation back to FBX and imported it to 3D Studio. Attached is a screen show showing the two cameras Rotation X controller in the Curve Editor. You can see that they both start and end at the right rotation value, but instead of following the track that swooshes up and down, the Unreal camera just shoots up to a single curve and then back down. It does not even remotely resemble the animation that it should.
Thanks
Ray
[Camera Animation FBX][1]
