All my meshes that are exported directly from Unreal’s native Z-up environment and used as background meshes in Anima come in upside down and even if I tell the program that the native orientation of the BG mesh is +Z up, it doesn’t let me orient the camera so Z is up. Am I missing something? This used to work. What is the expected workflow for using background meshes that need to be in Z-up to support the Unreal Engine? Does the importing process automatically swizzle correctly to Z-up when in Unreal?
Hello @tavershima_shande
When importing backgrounds from UE, the setup that works best for us is to select -Z as the vertical axis and Centimeters as units. Using those settings, everything works as expected.
Please, take a look at the sample video below:
This is what I did, and I noticed it is not a good workaround for many reasons. While -z in Anima seems okay, if you bring that animation back into Unreal, it won’t be in the desired location since Unreal is positve Z, which isn’t supported in Anima, it seems. Also, notice how, in the video, Anima seems to add an arbitrary translation to the background mesh in XYZ. The goal is for the resulting animations to be in the same place when they come back into Unreal. The workaround I have found is the following: Export my BG mesh from Unreal into Maya, then make Maya Y up and rotate my mesh, making sure the pivots are zeroed and the transforms are frozen, export that fbx and open it in anima and specify Y up, and zero out the translation Anima adds to the mesh( im thinking it Anima tries to center the bounding box and doesn’t center the mesh at 0,0,0 based on the pivot point), then the mesh works in anima and when the animation is imported into unreal it’s in the correct place.