This week has been particularly stressful, not because of the animation task (breathe life into a small angle-poise lamp) but the porting of the Maya animation into Unreal. I’ve long held a belief that if I were to do the MA course, it’d be needing to implement Unreal as the render and environment/lighting software, for speed and efficiency.
Last week I’d managed to model my Bauhaus set in Maya, import the set into through a fbx export, build up some lighting and fling a camera through it, grabbing a beautiful looking video. The rendered shots, 500 frames in total, spewed out of Unreal in around 15 minutes. Some of my peers on the course had spent 3 nights rendering Arnold shots only to have a video around 4 seconds long! So, whilst my intuition was right, getting this weeks animation into Unreal has been a nightmare.
After seeking advice on the MA fb forum, one Unreal certified chap introduced me to alembic caching, it’s basically a geometry flip book of your animation, frame by frame. So I managed after many long nights to port it into Unreal, if the rig doesn’t suit it’s incredibly difficult, lots of issues prevent it from being successful, so after finally getting somewhere I recorded the processs here for my students:
Unfortunately even after getting the lamp in, I still couldn’t get the ball in to translate around the scene. Some Googling later I came across a Amadeo Beretta and sent him an email asking for some mentoring. His YouTube account is chock full of extremely technical and experienced advice and I suspected he’d be the guy to help, thankfully he’s been guiding me though some of the foundations to iron out future difficulties. Here’s his channel – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMDRaVXKrhoFiKv1xdH14iA
And here’s my final submission for the week, I hope to get some time to import the ball which Amedeo sorted for me….
