Last week I gave Ziying the terrain I had already created to animate, so this week I started working on how to import the animations I had made in Maya into Unreal Engine 4. The skeletal system is different between the two software systems, so it was a bit difficult to get it into Unreal Engine 4.
The first thing I tried was to export the animation in abc format in Maya, and I found that although I had no problem importing the animation in this format, the abc format uses a material sphere by default, so I couldn’t reassign a material to my imported character. So I tried to use the exported fbx file format. But I still encountered two problems
1: The animations imported into Unreal Engine 4 are walking in place and not displaced.
2: The materials need to be completely reassigned.
My solution: problem 2 is relatively easy to solve, I just need to spend some more time rebuilding and specifying the mapping. Problem 1 I recreated the displacement animation in Unreal Engine 4. The animation in Unreal Engine 4 is a bit more complicated and cumbersome than in Maya, I had to be very careful with the positioning to avoid foot displacement.
After that, I started working on the third scene. The third scene is relatively straightforward, this one is a close-up with a scale in the foreground, the feet of two agents in the midground and the forest in the background. As it was a close-up I needed to set up the scene with much less content. I set up the camera according to the reference I found, and then placed the objects according to the camera screen. I replaced the scales with a sphere and the two agents with the basic human model from Unreal Engine 4.
Next week I’ll start working on the first panoramic scene, after which I’ll need to work on adding camera animations in Unreal Engine 4, which is looking very good so far. Keep up the good work!