Greetings,

First post here and I'm very excited.

I recently took on learning Houdini and even after following my first tutorial I seem to be stuck in terms of getting an animated FBX output so I can place it in my UE4 project. I know there are tons of videos and tutorials on this but please believe me even after watching them all I still can't get it to work. I know this should work on my licence version too so I desperately need help after days of work.

Following this tutorial I could get it working with my own 3D file instead of the test_geometry and have the exactly same setup right now;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGyiTQhS8ec [www.youtube.com]

Though, when I render in alembic as in the tutorial the output file is around 80GB (yes) and I obviously can't import it to UE4 - I have tried smaller versions and it works perfectly. Though I need the full 250 frame animation to be exported and be able to import to UE4, I have seen quite complex simulations can be transferred.

Right now, I have tried to export it using the Animated FBX in File menu as it is the most direct and straightforward or seemingly straightforward option. Though it creates an 8 byte FBX along with a xxxxx.fpc folder which I am not sure what to do with, I browsed a bit but was a dead end in terms of having a single FBX. 

Later on, I learned that in the /out context I also can create an Filmbox FBX Animation node and render it from there, as in the tutorial I simply do have a Geometry Node with everything happening inside and with an OUT null node at the very end. I picked the OUT node in my File 1 Geometry but it only generated a few bytes of file.

I then tried to use the RBD to FBX node from the Game Dev shelf, learned that a geometry has to be packed after getting the error that the node I was trying to export is not a geometry. So, before the OUT null I used a Pack node. I was like, this time it did work but it generates a 800mb FBX with 250 frames, UE4 sees that it is animated but it doesn't actually move and is as if it was a single frame. One giveaway of the problem was that when rendering it renders the first frame for a minute or so and then jumps to 250 right away and finishes. Also double checked with the 3D file viewer that it is not animated.

Lastly I tried the vertex_animation after seeing another few sets of tutorials, this time creating a CACHE_OUT and IN nodes too, but this time got this error at the start of render;
Error rendering child: /out/vertex_animation_textures1/render_position_and_packed_pscale/render_position_and_packed_pscale

Right now I feel like; GETTING AN ANIMATED FBX SHOULDN'T BE REALLY THIS HARD and finally understand why people are so scared of this software :-) 

I wonder what would anyone suggest for me to try at this point? If it would help I can send some screenshots of the node trees.

Thanks very much.

Running into this same problem. Pretty ridiculous imo. Very hard to convince people to jump to a software that cant even efficiently export a fbx with animation

Same here.Pretty ridiculous.

+++++++1

I'm having this issue too. My mesh works perfectly out of the ROP FBX but I cannot get anything to work with the animated skeleton or the fbx character output ((