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Cinemachine and Camera Animation from Maya

Discussion in 'Cinemachine' started by julien_garage, Feb 13, 2020 at 8:51 AM.

  1. julien_garage

    julien_garage

    Joined:
    Wednesday
    Posts:
    3
    Hi,:)

    I have as project to put my action animation in Unity but I cant find a way to put my camera animation from Maya and use it with the Unity's timeline.
    Let me explain with more details what I've done so far.

    In my Maya scene I have 2 character animations, one camera animation, and a background.

    I've exported my character as alembic, my background as FBX and my camera with the "Send to Unity" system.

    Now on my Unity scene :
    I have my game object "Scene00" who have "Playable Director" component.
    Inside it, there is my 2 characters and my camera from Maya (but no animation) and I put a "CinemachineBrain" on it.

    On the timeline of my game object "Scene00", I have my 2 character alembic track.

    My problem now is how to put my camera animation on this timeline and see my camera animation on the game view ?

    And an other question :
    If I update my character animation in Maya and reexport it on Unity, I loose the materials connection on the character, there is a way to avoid this ?

    Thank you very much:)
     
    julien_garage, Feb 13, 2020 at 8:51 AM
    #1

  2. Gregoryl

    Gregoryl

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Dec 22, 2016
    Posts:
    3,375
    You have generated your camera animation from Maya. There is no need for Cinemachine in this case, as Cinemachine is a procedural system for animating cameras. Remove the CMBrain, and attach your camera animation to an ordinary Camera object, as you would to any other object whose trajectory you have animated.
     
    Gregoryl, Feb 13, 2020 at 11:47 AM
    #2

  3. julien_garage

    julien_garage

    Joined:
    Wednesday
    Posts:
    3
    Okay I understand thank you very much.:)
    I did it !

    And for my alembic problem there is any solution to not have to reassign the materials on my character after updating my alembic data ?
     
    julien_garage, Feb 14, 2020 at 1:20 AM
    #3

  4. markvi

    markvi

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Oct 31, 2016
    Posts:
    58
    Hi Julien, Alembic doesn't carry materials very well – the shading group name is passed, but that's all. If you're only using clusters for skinning, you can export as FBX instead and you'll have your full character with materials (Arnold Standard is supported in 2019.3, before that only Stingray PBS and the old blinn/lambert/phong shaders were supported). Alternatively, you can bake your deformation to clusters using Maya's Skin > Bake Deformation to Skin Weights tool before you can export.

    In general, we don't recommend using Alembic for anything other than complex character deformation. FBX actually carries more data.
     
    markvi, Feb 14, 2020 at 3:45 PM
    #4

  5. julien_garage

    julien_garage

    Joined:
    Wednesday
    Posts:
    3
    Hi,
    Ok I see. I will try with FBX export. But the rig/ setup that I use looks pretty heavy , its take more than 15 minutes to export in FBX... I will do some test and see if I have good result

    Thank you very much for your reply
     
    julien_garage, Feb 17, 2020 at 3:08 AM
    #5
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