Alembic File Importer

The Alembic file format (ABC) is an open computer graphics interchange framework that distills complex, animated scenes into a non-procedural, application-independent set of baked geometric results. Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) enables you to import your Alembic files through the Alembic Importer, which gives you the freedom to create complex animations externally, then bring them into UE4 and render them in real-time.

Import Alembic files in a similar manner to several of the other forms of importing content into UE4.

You can also watch the Unreal Engine Live Stream on Animation Topics which include the Alembic File Importer:

Exporting Alembic Caches

When choosing to export your Alembic Cache files from your preferred DCC package, take the following under consideration:

Autodesk Maya Autodesk 3ds Max

1. From the File Menu under Cache and Alembic Cache, select Export All to Alembic... (or Selection) based on your needs.

   

2. In the Export window under Advanced Options, enable UV Write and Write Face Sets options, then click Export.

   

   You will need to enable Write Face Sets if you plan to create Materials during import into Unreal Engine 4 as Materials are created based on found Face Set Names.

Importing Alembic Files

To import an Alembic File into Unreal Engine 4:

1. Inside the Content Browser, click the Import button and point to your .abc file.
   

2. The Alembic Cache Import Options window will appear where you can define the method/options for importing. This window displays the name of the file and location you are importing from. You will also see checkbox options for the assets within your file that you can choose to include or exclude from the import process (you can also use the top level checkbox to include or exclude all tracks).

   

Currently, Unreal Engine only supports meshes containing three and four-sided polygons. Your Alembic data will fail to load if your geometry contains any polygons with greater than four sides, or if your geometry is made from NURBS or SubDiv surfaces.

Import as Static Mesh

During the import process, you can define how to import your content. By default, the Alembic Import Type is set to Static Mesh.

Importing an Alembic cache as a Static Mesh will import a single frame, specified by Frame Start value in the Sampling section, as one or multiple Static Meshes. The Alembic animation from that frame will be imported as a Static Mesh asset and without animation. The following settings are also available:

Static Mesh Options

When importing an Alembic file as a Static Mesh, if your data contains several meshes within it, you can choose Merge Meshes to create a single Static Mesh inside Unreal Engine. If you disable this option, each mesh within your Alembic file will be imported into UE4 as an individual Static Mesh instead.

Propagate Matrix Transformations

When enabling Merge Meshes, consider whether or not to Propagate Matrix Transformations prior to merging the meshes. This will take the transformation data contained within the Alembic file and propagate it to the meshes upon merging so they retain their transform data.

Consider the sample scene created below which we export as an Alembic cache.

When we import the file into UE4 as a Static Mesh with Merge Meshes and Propagate Matrix Transformations we get the following:

If we Merge Meshes but uncheck the Propagate Matrix Transformations we get the following:

Each of the meshes are merged at the 0,0,0 origin.

Sampling Options

Normal Calculation Options

How Normals are Calculated

The following is a high-level overview of how normals are calculated based on the Import type and how normals are used within the file to be imported.

• When importing a file that contains normals for all frames:

  • For Static Meshes / Geometry Cache : the engine uses existing normals.

  • For Skeletal Meshes : the normals from the first frame determine smoothing groups, which are used to calculate normals for the average frame and all the bases and morph-targets (we do this in all cases).

• When importing a file that contains normals for only the first frames:

  • For Static Meshes :If using frame 0, the engine uses existing normals. Otherwise it calculates smoothing groups and normals for the requested frame.

  • For Geometry Cache : the engine calculates smoothing groups and resulting normals for all frames.

• When importing a file that contains no normals:
  • The engine calculates non-smooth normals, generates smoothing groups according to the calculated normals and recalculates normals within the smoothing groups.

When enabling Recompute Normals, the path specified above is used (for no normals).

When importing as a Skeletal Mesh, if your animation has a large normal delta, you may run into issues getting correct-looking normals. This is a known issue caused by the way morph-targets can alter the face and vertex normals. As a workaround, you can bypass this problem by using the (experimental) skin cache feature.

You can enable this feature in your Project Settings using the Support Compute Skincache and Force all skinned meshes to recompute tangents options.

This should recompile shaders the next time you start the editor. When you open the Skeletal Mesh asset, you should be able to enable the Recompute Tangent option for each material or section..

How Smoothing Groups are Calculated

If you have hard edges on the meshes you import, you may want to look at the Hard Edge Angle Threshold and how smoothing group calculation is performed.

To calculate Smoothing Groups, first, the vertex and face normals are calculated, which are then used to look at all the faces that connect to a particular face. By calculating the angle between the normals, we can then determine if an edge is hard or soft (similar to the Soft/Hard Edges tool in Maya). Below, the image on the left we would consider a soft edge, while the image on the right, a hard edge. This is because the angle between the two normals in the image on the left is smaller than that of the angle of the two normals in the image on the right.

Knowing this, we use a dot product to generate a range from 0 to 1 as a threshold to define when an edge should be hard versus soft. For example, a value closer to 1 would mean that the angle is larger resulting in a hard edge, while closer to 0 would mean a soft edge. This information is then used to generate groups of normals that share soft edges. For each of these groups, we smooth the normals across the faces creating smooth faces.

Forcing one smoothing group per object makes each individual object completely smooth (all soft edges).

Import as Geometry Cache

Importing as a Geometry Cache creates a new type of animation asset that allows playback of vertex-varying sequences.

The imported Alembic animation will be played back as a Flipbook of frames and performance will scale with the complexity of your mesh.

Geometry Cache includes the same Sampling and Normal Calculation settings as the Static Mesh import option, while adding additional support for Materials and motion vectors. This method of import has the ability to create Materials according to found Face Set names (this will not work without Face Sets defined in your external application and exported as part of the Alembic cache). Importing motion vectors is enabled by changing the Motion Vectors option found in the Geometry Cache category of the importer:

Click the small down arrow at the bottom of the Geometry Cache section to see these options.

Include motion vectors to calculate the vertex velocities of your model and use them to calculate motion blur.

Currently, Geometry Cache assets do not support an adjacency buffer, which is required for tessellation setup. As a workaround, you can import an animation as a Skeletal Mesh with morph targets (which is a more compressed way of importing) as this will support tessellation.

Import as Skeletal

This method imports the Alembic file as a Skeletal Mesh containing base poses as morph targets and blending between them to achieve the correct animation frame. Importing as a Skeletal Mesh is the most efficient way to play back an Alembic animation, as long as the vertex count does not change.

During import, your animation sequence will be compressed using a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) scheme, in which common poses (bases) are extracted and weighted to compose the original animation during playback time. When importing as a Skeletal Mesh, in addition to Sample, Normal Calculation and a Create Materials option you can also define the percentage (or fixed number of bases used) to tweak the level of compression.

Compression Options

Animations containing significant vertex displacement from the origin may cause distortion to the Skeletal Mesh. You can mitigate this by choosing the No Compression option for Base Calculation Type and enable Merge Meshes.