Grasshopper Animations to Unreal Engine 4

[lfernandez]

Hey there!
Does anyone know how export/import GH animations to Unreal Engine?
I am trying several things from making a .obj sequence import to blender then export to a .fbx file to then import to unreal engine. Is a lot of exporting/importing and I’m just wandering if someone here has a better solution.

[Czaja (Jakub Czajczynski)]

Hi, I did it successfully by bringing the .obj sequence into Blender and then exporting it as the alembic file format.
Certainly not very elegant. I wrote about it here:

Stopmotion Alembic animation + Grasshopper test

Hello, Recently I needed to export animated objects straight out of Grasshopper. I’m not aware of other methods than trying to do it through Alembic file format. Unfortunately, Rhino can’t export to this format and I saw some wishes about it, which I of course join: https://discourse.mcneel.com/search?q=alembic However, I found one workaround which for now I think is better than nothing. You can use e.g. Pancake GH plugin to export series of stopframes to Obj format and then use Stop Motion …

[lfernandez]

Thanks! Looks like a good workaround. I’ll try it! Btw the pink bubble animation on sketchfab was rendered on UE4?

[Czaja (Jakub Czajczynski)]

No, everything was made in Grasshopper & Sketchfab. In the linked thread there is nothing about UE4, but the same way I did some animation of VisualARQ shutters. The goal is to have animation in alembic format, after that you can easily import it in Unreal.

[enzo_molinari]

Rhino.Inside.UE - Getting Started

Thanks for the “hello world” equivalent in Unreal using USharp to access Rhino.Inside C# libraries from Unreal. I’d like to build on this and extend the functionality by creating some functions either as a UFunctionLibrary or an AActor to call Rhino.Inside functionality at runtime rather than at initialisation which appears to be when the level first opens in the editor - as your code is based on a GameModel. Transplanting the code into an AActor or UFunctionLibrary, I’m getting errors in the …

Unfortunately Rhino.Inside.UE did not have the same luck (or sponsor) of Rhino.Inside.Revit

if your budget allows you…
Mindesk VR/AR | Food4Rhino

[kitjmv (jmv)]

Hello @lfernandez

I think (if you have access) Rhino → TwinMotion → UE4 is a solution to test regularly.
It’s still in development, but it’s promising.
Mainly because, even with two transfers, it is fast and can be synchronized.
It is already possible to use a large number of features, on the other hand there is no integration in Grasshopper.

Twin Motion superiority for architectural rendering

I think it is appropriate to reopen this question in a few months or even next year. I agree with everything you just said. The software is awesome, easy with a library and impressive rendering. The cofiguration is limiting, the rendering of Mmde X has the same atmosphere as the rendering of Mr Y. I regularly test TwinMotion and each time I reject its use. From a development perspective, Epic has just acquired TwinMotion. Look at the roadmap to understand that TwinMotion is not yet finaliz…

jmv

[archz2]

Came here while searching for a method for alembic exports. I have Pancake plugin installed but can’t find the obj sequence export option. I am going through the example files as well.

Can anyone please share a grasshopper definition for the same?

[Czaja (Jakub Czajczynski)]

Hi, you will not find the obj sequence export option in Pancake.
The trick is that you export a series of obj files for each step of your solution (e.g. each value of some slider). You need to export just a bunch of obj files from Grasshopper.

The whole process is very similar to dealing with video data, often you find a series of png files where every file is just one frame. You import them into some video editing program and export them packed as one file like .mp4. Because OBJ format doesn’t support animation, each obj file is like one “frame” of the animation.
You must import a series of obj files into Blender using the plugin mentioned earlier and export it packed into one alembic file.

Note that it’s a totally brute force method and if you want smooth animation you might end up with a lot obj files and a quite heavy alembic file. Animation did this way is not moving any mesh vertices but using completely new geometry for each frame.

[archz2]

Okay. So what exactly are you using Pancake plugin for in the entire workflow?

[Czaja (Jakub Czajczynski)]

Just exporting a series of obj files.

pancake obj series export sample.gh (12.2 KB)

[archz2]

Wow! That’s so amazing seriously! I imported the obj sequence exported from your grasshopper file, directly in Cinema 4D.

Looks really cool! Brilliant workflow man! Thank you so much for this.