Hi 
I would like to know how you get a character to move in iclone to match the environment  in Unreal Engine. Lets say for example I have some stairs leading up to a door of a building in Unreal engine. Through the door is a room with a sofa in it. How do I animate in iclone for my character to go up the stairs reach for the handle of the door - open it then walk and sit on the sofa. How does that communicate into the unreal environment. Surely it cant all be guess work, how would I know how many steps they should climb, how would I know in iclone where the door handle is. I hope there is a simple solution to this that I am missing otherwise I can see this being really tedious work.   

What about doing the animation first and then just placing,  moving and scaling the environment so it looks right?

I have already built the environment, now I want to add people. I am not going to create people animate them and then build an environment around my animations how would I know what to animate if I had no world to put them into?

The only way I can think of is to create a mockup of the environment in iClone. (I don't know if you could export it from Unreal, that would be another option.)

It doesn't have to be fancy, but it would have to provide the position and size of the stairs, for example, furniture, the size of the room, etc. 

After you have created the animation in iClone, it may best to do a Collect Clip in the timeline and save as Motion Plus. The gets you all animation in one clip, which you can then use for exporting.

I'm not an Unreal user, so experts may have a better idea.

---

It should take much less time to build a static environment around animations then to edit all animations by hand to make them fit the environment.

I don't think you can get around editing everything by hand if you don't want to change the environment. Maybe you can use some camera tricks, so that the viewer cannot see if animations and environment don't line up perfectly to save time. 

I haven't used Unreal and iClone together yet (it's a project for the end of the year) but I've been paying attention to tutorials, etc. If you do a quick search of this forum and/or YouTube I remember there are tutorials for IC7 and UE4 where they export the mesh from UE as an FBX, then load that into iClone. You then animate in iClone using the mesh as a guide and then send the animation, cameras, etc to UE. I'd assume it's the same process for UE5 and IC8.

Jeff Kirkland | Director • Cinematographer • Storyteller
Hobart • Tasmania • www.one18films.com
SYSTEM: AMD Ryzen 5 5500 | 32gb RAM | RTX 3060 12gb | 1tb SSD System | 44tb HDD Storage

Export only your path/object/meshes in fbx (don't care about materials) then import it in Iclone. Make the animation.
Export your animation  into unreal. It should match.