Maya animation not showing in Unreal 4

[Anonymous]

Hello all, I'm an animator and still very new to rigging and the Unreal 4 engine. I recently rigged a cat in Maya and my teammate imported it in to the editor after successfully bringing in the skeletal mesh. When I animate the bones themselves in Maya, they play in editor, but if I try to animate using control curves, nothing happens when brought into UE4. I've tried manually baking the keys, baking through the FBX importer, doing both and doing neither, exporting the bones by themselves and exporting the bones with the mesh, and nothing seems to work. I'm also unsure of how to set up joints so that the root bone is at the origin in Maya (which is apparently a requirement for UE4 that I was unaware of.) I'm not sure if this has something to do with it. Any help would be appreciated!

[J450NP13]

Are your animation clip model separate from your main model?

[Anonymous]

You mean did I save them out as separate files? Yes. I tried both saving from the original file and making a separate one.

[Anonymous]

Just an update, I had been parenting the curves to joints via different constraints - I tried both parent and orient constraints, neither had any effect in Unreal. I then tried connecting them with the connection editor and that worked for showing the animation in editor, but in Maya it caused the curves not to rotate the mesh properly (the axes were off - I'd rotate along the vertical axis and it would rotate left or right, etc.)

Any help would seriously be appreciated. I can't move forward until I figure this out.

[saihtam]

Doing constraints are what you want. Remember that you want to bake the animation to the skeleton and then export the skeleton to Unreal. I would highly recommend you watch some tutorials on how to get from Maya to Unreal.

Here is one that should be helpful.

[Anonymous]

I did find that tutorial last night and I've already tried what he shows. Unfortunately he doesn't go over HOW he set up his orient constraints, which I'm thinking might be my problem (I literally just select the curve and joint and hit Orient.) I did bake the animation to the skeleton, I tried that both manually and through the FBX exporter, neither worked. I've come to the forums because I've found literally no tutorials that tell how to set up your bones, constraints and export options specifically for bringing an animation into Unreal.

[saihtam]

That's what he's done as well, not much more you can do. Can you share your scene, pictures of it(the outliner etc) or tell more about how you've set it up?

You don't need to include the mesh if you don't want to share that. Also, please upload an MA file(you'll need to zip it if you want to upload using the forum).

[Anonymous]

I get an unknown nodes error when trying to save as an MA file, but here are a couple of pictures.

Outliner view - not every joint but this shows the main ones. Again, moving these directly results in successful animation in editor.

Controller placement. Obviously don't have all control curves made yet, but the ones that are there drive the skeleton through orient constraints. When baking animation, I select the skeleton from the root and go to bake. 

And finally my export options...

[Anonymous]

Another update. I tried this out on a test cylinder and the cat itself, and it worked in both cases. Before I was clicking on the root of the skeleton to highlight the whole thing and baking from there. This time I tried clicking on just the moving joint (the neck, for instance) and baked only that - it showed up in editor like it was supposed to. However, I feel like this isn't how you're supposed to do it. It will be a pain to go through and bake every joint individually once I have more complicated animations. Surely there's an easier way.

[saihtam · Accepted solution]

I recommend that you bake all your joints before doing the export. If you're only selecting the top joint(your root joint) then make sure you have hierarchy set to "Below" in the option box. If not, then you need to select all your joints.

[Anonymous]

THANK YOU! It was literally the only option I was missing - checking "Below" worked just fine. Thank you so much, been pulling my hair out over this.

[YUXINYX05_22]

Where is the "below" option ;-; Thank you

[bjanesR2HK2]

Where/how do you select that option?