Regarding animation, I want to explain my process for creating and rendering animations.
First, I align the character to the center point in Maya, and then create the animation. During this process, my primary consideration is that I need to simulate the clothing in Marvelous Designer, so I leave 20 frames of space before each animation to allow my character to transition from pose A to my animation frame.
Then I export the completed animation by selecting all the polygons and exporting it as an ABC format file, which will make it easier to manipulate in Marvelous Designer.
The third step is to import the ABC file into Marvelous Designer. I need to zoom in on the ABC file; otherwise, it will affect the realism of the clothing simulation. Then, I align the clothing with the center point of my character’s A pose animation and perform the simulation. There was a problem during the first simulation because the character’s hair always affected the clothing simulation. So I further optimized the process. When importing Marvelous Designer, I no longer import the hair, but only the body. This saves space and time, and the clothing simulation is more realistic.
After the simulation is complete, I will export the clothing animation in ABC format, import it into Maya, and then scale the clothing down to a suitable size for the character; in my case, it’s 0.2 times.
Then, in Maya, I exported the aligned clothing, character animation, and hair animation together as an ABC file, and deleted the reserved frames at the beginning.
Finally, I imported the exported ABC animation file into Unreal Engine. I paid special attention to the following: I used geometry cache for importing and did not select Flatten tracks. If I selected it, my ABC file would not have the texture property after being imported into Unreal Engine.
Then, I matched all the animation materials in Unreal Engine and placed the animation into the scene for comparison. Since I had already calculated the size between the character and the object beforehand, I think my workflow is quite complete.
Finally, import the ABC animation into the sequencer and add a geometry cache to it.