After I had finalized all my animation and clothes simulations in Maya, I moved everything into Unreal Engine. This was another challenging stage of the project because, despite my careful preparation, importing the assets came with its own set of problems. I exported the camera from Maya as FBX and brought it into Unreal so I could maintain the exact framing I had planned for every shot. The Blender character was imported as Alembic cache, which meant I couldn’t attach the sword directly to the body. To solve this, I also imported the sword as Alembic cache and planned keyframes carefully.
One major challenge was aligning the characters with the Unreal world. When importing the camera and characters, I realized that Unreal placed them at the origin of the world. This meant I had to move my entire environment so that the locations I had planned for each character matched the world center. I created multiple sub-levels and carefully positioned everything, testing placement with reference points to make sure all the shots lined up correctly.
Every shot seemed to bring a new problem. Some FBX files imported fine, others caused errors or didn’t play the animations correctly. Sometimes the rig would break, or the Alembic cache wouldn’t match perfectly with the character’s master control. I realized that the most reliable solution was to import each shot separately as a complete skeletal mesh rather than trying to use one skeleton for multiple animations. This approach was time-consuming but ensured stability.
Once the characters were successfully imported, I moved on to adding visual effects. This included swords glowing, characters appearing and disappearing, and eye glow effects. Each effect had to be carefully keyframed on the timeline to match the animation. It was a painstaking process, but seeing everything come together in Unreal was incredibly satisfying. This stage taught me how complex exporting and importing pipelines can be, and how much patience and iteration are required to get everything working smoothly.