Importing path animation to UDK? (escalator)

Mik2121

Hello there.

I've been working on an escalator to put in UDK and I decided to animate it. I never do animation stuff so I don't know how to get the animation to work inside UDK.

Right now my escalator has 19 steps, and I animated all of them using a path I had placed earlier and then just setting it to "Path Constraint" and moving all of them as different meshes and with a slight start and ending percentage to offset the stairs. This is the result:



Now, the problem is that this is 19 meshes and I don't know how to attach them to keep them as one single mesh that moves along the path instead of using the motion of the first step I select.

I also still have the spline available... would I be able to use this in some way within UDK and animate from there?


Thanks!

Mik2121

Well, I was able to export it as one mesh by placing one dummy for each step, animating them and then creating a mesh with all the steps and doing some skin weighting.

It works, but now the issue is that I want the character to be moved automatically but the way the collision works barely lets me do it

Hourences

I would have done it all in UDK. Skel animations are heavy and offer little control for things like collision like you just found out. Interpactors render much more efficiently, though would in this case lead to more drawcalls which perhaps offsets the speed won, and allow for more precise collisions.

It would take about 10 min to set up using interpactors. You only need to animate 1 step, and then you copy over the matinee 18 more times, you put them all to looping, and you start each step with X delay.

Check one of the various basic matinee tutorials for UE3.

Mik2121

Hey Hourences, thanks for the reply!
I was thinking about using matinee but, as you said, I was a bit worried that having so many drawcalls would be bad, and overall be a bit messy. But alas, just importing the animation isn't working because of the collisions, so I will try what you suggested.

Thanks!!