Any advice, workflow cinema 4D → Alembic → ARKit

I am doing some prototyping working using ARKit with a visual designer who specializes in motion design & animaiton.


He is creating 3D content using Cinema 4D & ideally he wants to use the Alembic file format to have animated content.


One quesiton is - what is the current state of support for Alembic animations? I am very new to working with this format.


I have gone through the steps of importing an ".abc" file into Xcode. It does not seem like the animations are importable. I saw in another post that alembic animaitons only work with transforms currently . Will Xcode or should Xcode report any conversion errors?


I can see the animation when using apps like Blender 3D or using the preview alembic package in Unity 3D 2018.3. Side note: the alembic support in Unity does not work with iOS.


https://forum.unity.com/threads/alembic-for-unity.521649/

Replies

I have made some progress using the Unreal Engine from Epic with IOS.


The Unreal game engine has experimental support for alembic animations. I was able to creste an Unreal level map and load & play an imported animation using v 4.21 of the engine. However, my experince with the Unreal engine is limited. I kept crashing the Unreal editor when trting to use the object in a blueprint file with ARKit. Blueprints are node basd documents for creating logic much like Quartz Composer from Apple.


When importing into the Unreal engine for animaiton support, it should be imported as a geometry cache.


https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Content/AlembicImporter


It seems that the way I was creating an ARKit app will need to be re-architected using a timeline sequenvce in Unreal. Does anyone know any good & to the point tutuorials for spawning an actor from a geometry cache object that uses a the sequencer in the Unreal Engine?


https://api.unrealengine.com/INT/BlueprintAPI/Components/GeometryCache/index.html



To recap:


SceneKit - limited alembic animaiton support

Unity - alembic animaiton support but does not work on iOS; requires using an preview package

Unreal Engine - alemibc animaiotn supoort which seems to work wiht iOS (I have only tried one animation so far)