Questions about Animation using Quill

[frankshammer42]

Hi, we are trying to do some animations with our Quill project and I saw that Dear Angelica's animations were made procedurally with Unreal. I am wondering why you guys don't use other engines like Unity or Cryengine, does Unreal has some particular advantages over those engines(like Blueprint functions?)

Thank you!!!!

[chorne]

It was a decision we made at the studio early on - mainly because the tools were more similar to the film industry than Unity. We also liked that Unreal had a great look out of the box, whereas Unity required some work to get to that level of visual quality (at the time there were only two of us - so it made a HUGE difference). It's not really a decision we've revisited since then - but many people at the studio have Unity experience and use Unity in their personal projects.

What you're asking in many ways is similar to "Mac vs Windows" -- the preference largely lies in the specifics of what you're trying to accomplish. I suggest trying both and rolling with what you like more. 

As a sidenote - I would love to see what you end up creating!!! Sounds exciting. Best of luck!

[frankshammer42]

Hello chorne, my teammates and I are still trying to figure out a way to implement the animations. The thing that bothers us is that we don't have the control over the exact order of appear and disappear of an object using shader. Can you guys share some tips of how to do that?

[chorne]

The order is based on the order that they were painted in Quill. It's an arbitrary piece of per-vertex data called "time" -- you can modify this data in most 3D software packages (for Dear Angelica we used Houdini). We then rigged up a parameter that would allow us to threshold along that time value. Below is the shader we used in Unreal Engine to do this:




Open the image in a new tab to view it full size.

That flipcomp at the end plugs directly into the opacity of the shader. Hopefully that helps shed some light. 

[Anonymous]

Hi! I´m also trying to achieve this effect. Thanks a lot for the UE shader! Is this data (time) embeded in the .fbx exported from Quill?

[chorne]

It's definitely in the alembic file. Unsure if it's embedded in the fbx file - though you can find out easily by checking the embedded vertex data.

[rlapham]

Hi chorne, I've been working with the alembic export in unity and am running into trouble on the build. 
Using the AlembicImporter (https://github.com/unity3d-jp/AlembicImporter), there are conflicting plugins. 

Can you please recommend the best way to bring alembic animations into ARKit? 
Thanks,
Richard

[schevrel]

See this tutorial on how to bring alembic in Unity

https://quill.fb.com/developers/how-to-use-quill-animated-abc-in-unity

[rlapham]

Thanks schevrel, that's a great walkthrough. I've gotten that far and have the animations running in the editor. 

The problem comes when trying to build. I get a conflicting plugin error (abci.dil) when building. Do you know if it supports iOS/mac builds?

Thanks,
Richard

[rlapham]

A little more detail: 
Build successful when x86 abci.dll is unselected and only using x86_64 plugin. The export works (mesh and color accurate) but without animation. 

Here's the error in Xcode:

DllNotFoundException: Unable to load DLL 'abci': The specified module could not be found.

  at UTJ.Alembic.aiContext.aiContextCreate (Int32 uid) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 

  at UTJ.Alembic.AlembicStream.AbcLoad (Boolean createMissingNodes) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 

  at UTJ.Alembic.AlembicStreamPlayer.LoadStream (Boolean createMissingNodes) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 

Thank again for any help in this,

Richard