Step 3: Rigging
Once I finished texture painting, the next step is the rigging my model. I usually use the ADV plug-in in Maya for rigging, although in the course we introduced the Control Rig system in UE5, but I really need more practice on it, so I still choose to use the ADV plug-in to complete the robot rigging in this project.
Rigging in Maya with the plug Advanced Skeleton
Step 4: Scene design
I chose a UE5 factory scene asset, selected the model needed, and redesigned the texture in substance painter to match the visual style I had envisioned.
Once the components redesign is complete, the models are imported into Maya and ready for character animation.
Step 5: Animation
After integrating the model and building the scene, the next step is to do character animation and add camera animation.
Step 6: Import scene from Maya to UE5
Once the scene was built in Maya, the next step was to import the scene to UE5 for lighting and other rendering Settings, and in this step, especially the transfer of animation files, I encountered technical difficulties that took a lot of time to resolve. First I tried to export the FBX sequence of the character animation, but after doing so, the following problem occurred:
The animated sequences were strangely stretched, and the models were wildly split.
Unfortunately, even when I finally asked the technician for help, it didn’t resolve the problem, so I had to use another export solution: the alembic cache file.
way to export alembic cache file in Maya
Before exporting, follow the following Settings:
- Merge all meshes
- Optimize the model, especially the non-standard mesh
- Select the options shown in the following figure in the alembic cache export window
Once the abc file has been successfully imported into UE, you can open the animation cache file, which should have the same number of material slots as in Maya, and paste the corresponding material in to get the correct animation sequence.