Exporting a character picking up and holding an object from maya to unreal

taurobinsonfarrar93

I decided to render my film in unreal engine instead of redshift because of the super fast render times and the aesthetics, but I have some issues that I cannot figure out. The first question is how do I export a fully rigged and animated character along with an object? Would I have to parent the object to the character in unreal? Another question that I have is I am adding a dust effect into the film. Can I export it into unreal? Do I have to render it with redshift and composite in the shot later? Or do I have to create the same effect in unreal engine?

oglu

if its a custom rig you cant export it to unreal... you need a humanik rig or the unreal rig itself...
or find a way to retarget your rig to a compatible rig...

if you need only the animated char i would use an alembic file to get it itno unreal for rendering...

there are some docs you sould read if you plan to go that path...
https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/Unreal+Engine/Why-Real-Time-Technology-is-the-Future-of-Film-and-Television-Production-ecc14547ab8a340d4c00e2f931adfcf3a201478d.pdf

https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/Unreal+Engine/resources/Virtual-Production-white-paper-62e08e13d5ff8b76f17286b33297e741bdca5db5.pdf

Obscura

You could just include the object bone into the character bone hierarchy and animate the pickup. The object should be parented to the root bone of the character. This is the simplest way if you only want to render it later in Unreal. About the dust, its the best to use a particle built inside Unreal. There isn't really good ways to transfer particles of different renderers into Unreal, because particles and shaders are treated differently in every of them.

And you can definitely export any custom rig into unreal No need for retargeting or anything like that.

The mannequin character rig that comes with Unreal is popular because it has a bunch of stuff for it on the Unreal marketplace, so indie developers without proper artists can use it easily, and for relatively cheap with the stuff bought from the marketplace. Other than that, it doesn't have any advantages. Its a generic humanoid rig with real life scale.