I'm making a monster for Unreal Engine. I'd like to have some realistic, physics-based animation on its muscles. I don't know if Houdini is the right tool for this.

There is a new Muscles & Tissue [www.sidefx.com] system, which looks very powerful, but how am I going to export this to a game engine?

I know it's impossible to have a real-time realistic muscle sim in a game engine, so I plan to make the animation & simulation in Houdini. But how could I export it to Unreal? Alembic files are way too large, and generally very hard to work with game engine features like character controller.

Is it possible to somehow export the simulated muscle some game-engine-friendly skeleton animation? Like a normal skeleton rigging + some morph targets? Or "bake" the simulation into bone weights? (I don't know if such magic exists).

Could someone share their experience on this topic?

raincole
Or "bake" the simulation into bone weights?

Maybe you can try Labs Skinning Converter [www.sidefx.com]

tamte
Maybe you can try Labs Skinning Converter [www.sidefx.com]

If I understand it correctly, it works on a single mesh sequence. If I have two animations, say jump and walk, it can't produce a skeleton for both. So I'm not sure how helpful it is...

raincole
If I have two animations, say jump and walk, it can't produce a skeleton for both. So I'm not sure how helpful it is...

You can join all your caches to a single sequence, generate animated skeleton and split/export individual animation clips

Or maybe you can try using second input and use custom bones for all clips

tamte

raincole
If I have two animations, say jump and walk, it can't produce a skeleton for both. So I'm not sure how helpful it is...

You can join all your caches to a single sequence, generate animated skeleton and split/export individual animation clips

Or maybe you can try using second input and use custom bones for all clips

Ok, I'll try it. Thank you very much!