Using the UE Plugin

The workflow with Unreal Engine is mostly the same as with the other plugins. The only important difference is that there is no Alive Synchronization between Anima and Unreal Engine due to the different internal architecture of a Game Engine compared with other standard 3D applications (like 3ds Max, Maya, or Cinema 4D).

That said, the Anima Drop panel is also available in Unreal Engine and the Anima plugins will let you import native Anima projects directly into your UE levels, taking care of all the asset conversion in a completely automated process. Also, there is an Anima plugin for UE that is specifically designed to support our 4D models and highly optimize their performance using the GPU hardware available.

The way to proceed is to use the import button on UE and select directly the *.aniproj file from the anima project folder. Then, select the preferred options in the dialogs that you are shown (default options should work fine), and you should get all the anima content imported into your level automatically.

In this article, we will describe in detail both the standard import process and the usage of the Anima Drop panel.

In the following video tutorial, you can see a real "Use case" scenario where Anima is used to add 3d people to an ArchViz project inside Unreal Engine.

In the latest versions, we introduced new types of models (4D Digital Humans and Ambient) that are compatible with our Unreal Engine plugin and can raise significantly the level of realism that can be achieved in real-time engines.

This conceptual project tries to awaken interest in the search for new stylistic forms of visualization for the architectural spaces that surround us. In this series of visual sequences, the artist Pavel Huerta makes us discover how the use of black and white in photography can communicate an architectural space with tremendous expressive force. The lights and shadows become the protagonists, which like the geometries, model the space with an unparalleled emotional force. Finally, this tectonicity and its criteria of solidity and sustenance are opposed to the human, physical, social and spiritual dimensions.

The Anima plugin for UE will be installed automatically if a compatible version of UE is detected during the Anima Stand-Alone installing process:

There are many differences in both the internal structure and the concept behind the production workflow on a Game Engine compared to the standard offline animation and render methods used by classic 3D apps, and those differences raised incompatibilities that forced us to discard the usage of the Render Node plugin with Unreal. This may change in the future, as Epic continues developing their offline renderers. But for now, to use Anima with Unreal Engine, you will have to use the Workstation installation mode of Anima.

Anima will support the 3 latest stable versions of UE that are available when each new version of Anima is released.

We follow this policy because Epic Games introduces changes in core aspects of their software that are not 100% backward compatible, so we need to focus our effort on a limited number of versions to maximize the stability of our plugin.

Also, notice that Anima will not be compatible with any kind of UE custom build from any source. Only the official pre-compiled binaries provided by the Epic Games launcher are officially supported by Anima. That means that even the UE compilations made from the official Source Code provided by Epic will not work with Anima.

The correct workflow for us to support any kind of custom build would be to recompile, retest, and debug our plugin for that particular UE build. Unfortunately, we only have the resources to perform those stability tests in a sustainable way with the latest 3 versions of UE provided by the Epic Launcher.

Once installed, you can simply start using Anima to create your projects and build all the scenes that you plan to send to Unreal.

After that, you can save them as usual and launch your Unreal project where you will import your scenes in. All the hard work of packaging the scenes, actors, materials, and animations will be done 100% automagically by our UE plugin.

1. Inside UE, open your Unreal project and then click on the import button from the Content Browser:

2. Browse for your Anima Project and click on Open.

3. The file should be correctly detected by the plugin and the import process will begin.

4. After a few seconds the Anima Open Scene dialog will appear to let you choose which scene of the project do you want to import into UE:

6. Select the scene that contains the animation that you want to import and click Open. The import process will start showing a progress bar with the current status:

7. After a few seconds, a new window will appear to let you configure the actions that will be performed during the importing processл

Import Options

You have four drop-down selectors to define: Material type, Search paths, Duplicated assets, and Existing actors. Each of these selectors has a tooltip that explains what action will be performed for each option:

• Material Type.
  • Realistic characters: Fully shaded materials including SSS for the skin.
  • White Lambertian characters: White characters for Non-Photo Realistic renders.
  • Reflective semitransparent characters: Reflective ghost style for Non-Photo Realistic characters.
• Search Paths:
  • Search in all packages: Search collision items in all the Unreal Engine project folders (this will affect actors, materials, lights, etc.).
  • Search in the current package: Search collision items only in the current folder of the Unreal Engine project (this will affect actors, materials, lights, etc).
• Duplicated Assets:
  • Keep existing assets: In the case of overlapping assets, ignore the new asset, and keep the old one.
  • Replace existing assets: In the case of overlapping assets, delete the old asset, and import the new one.
• Existing Actors:
  • Replace existing actors: In case of overlapping actors, delete the old actor and import the new one.
  • Keep existing actors: In case of overlapping actors, ignore the new actor and keep the old one.

After the options are set, click on the Import button and the process will continue.

Finally, when the import progress ends, you can run the simulation. You'll see the actors moving through the scene exactly how they do inside the Anima Design.

Over the years, we have added many optimizations to the import process in order to get as much as performance as possible inside UE and improve the smoothness of your real-time projects.

One of the technics most used to optimize real-time applications is having multiple Levels of Detail on each model, adapting dynamically the detail of the objects to the distance between the camera and that object. The more distance, the lower size has that model in the viewport and the lesser detail is perceived by the viewer, which allows for a higher optimization by switching to an equivalent model that uses a mesh with less geometry and skeleton with less animated bones.

Now, LODs are generated for all the actors imported in UE, which results in many performance improvements when creating large crowds of characters, especially when you look at them from a certain distance.

Also, we have added direct transfer capabilities when using GPU decoding for the animation playback on the 4D actors, resulting in really big improvements in real-time performance when using that type of model.

For example, internal benchmarks have shown that scenes with 20 4D actors that before this improvement run at around ~20 FPS in a computer using a single GPU Nvidia GTX 1080, now can run up to ~160 FPS in that same machine, making these actors much more affordable on projects that require high refresh rates.

Take a look at the demo video we made for version 4.1, which has been entirely rendered using UE:

These performance improvements are available when using the D3D11 or D3D12 RHI. The Vulkan RHI will also have performance improvements, but no direct transfer is available at the moment.

With all the new improvements, now you can finally populate big scenes using Anima also in your real-time projects, taking advantage of our complete set of tools and actors to build the simulations, including our highly acclaimed 4D models.

Using our new Drag&Drop panel you can access the Anima library and start populating your scenes with your Ready-Posed (static) and your 4D Digital Humans with a simple Drag&Drop gesture right away into 3ds Max and with a quick send button that will import the models (including all their texture variations) directly into Cinema 4D and Unreal Engine.

Here you have an example of how this process works inside Unreal Engine:

1. Drag & Drop the models into the app
2. Place the models using the transformation tools available by default in that application.
3. (Optional) Change the material of the actor mesh with any other material from all the variations generated by our plugin.

Before using the new 4D Digital Humans models in your UE projects, make sure to read the recommendations from the article Tips and Tricks for UE as there is important information there that may help you improve the performance of your scene and avoid some common pitfalls.

In the options of each 4D model, you will find a Phase parameter that will let you offset the animation of that model directly from inside UE. This parameter is equivalent to the one with a similar name (Motion clip phase) that you find inside the Anima standalone application. Inside UE, you will find it here:

Once inside UE, the animation of each actor can be tweaked just the same as any other imported scene object (non-interactive).
For example, you can increase the play rate of the animation to simulate a time-lapse like the one shown at our Anima version 3 promotional video.
To change this parameter to all the Anima actors you can select all of them using the World Outliner:

• Right-click on the Anima folder (project) or any of his subfolders (scenes) and
• Click on Select > Immediate Children:

Once all of them are selected, you can accelerate the actors changing the play rate parameter to a higher number than 1:

And finally, enjoy the result: