Cinema 4D/Alembic animation to Keyshot

[jblaze]

Hi guys,
I'm doing a relatively simple animation of a small device modeled in Solidworks. At a certain point I want to show the USB port cap/plug being pulled away so a USB cable can be plugged in for charging. Unfortunately the cap is a complex part and I can't find a way to animate using Keyshot's available options. Attached is a screenshot of the cap.
That's why I exported the original SW files to STEP and imported them in Cinema 4D (I'm not a C4D expert, recently started learning the basics). After animating the cap I exported it as Alembic and imported in KS. The animation works fine but the quality of the part is not okay. As you can see from the attached screenshots Animation start & end the part's mesh is messing up the cap appearance.
Attached are the export and import settings I'm using and the work files - STEP, C4D, Alembic animation and KS scene.

I would be really grateful if you can give me any ideas how to fix the issue.
Thank you!

[mattjgerard]

OK , i see what you are trying to do, and with all things, there are about 27 ways to go about doing it.

I did a quick remodel of your object for an example, but i think if you remodel your object with the "cable" or retainer thing straight, you will always have more success bending an object than unbending it. The bones Idea would probably work this way too, but I usually default to the bend deformer for this sort of thing. super simple, just one object and easy to animate.

The reason your surfaces were going wonky was because there were point that were not intended to be moved included in the bones selections. So, it was just a simple mechanical reason the geomtery was going off when imported into KS, the problem was actually in C4D and how the points were connected to the bones. I've never used bones before, so I'm not sure how they work, but I could see that as the bones were "unbent" there were points in the plug surface that were moving too, leading me to think it was a selection issue in C4D.

See the attached example to see what I'm talking about. Model the whole thing straight, and as so often is the case, animate from the end to the beginning. This will export alembic just fine and provide lots of control. be sure to export your model with sufficient detail so that the bend deformer has enough polys to work with. KS can handle huge amounts of polys so don't worry about making it lightweight.

[jblaze]

Thanks for your reply.
I managed to fix the issue.
As you suggested the bending deformer or using bones on the imported model is affecting the quality. So I imported the pull tab and the port gasket as separate objects at the unbent position (end position of the animation). Using the model done with bend deformer as a reference I created a cylinder and bended it to follow the needed shape.
The last step was to animate the cylinder bending and the rotation of the pull tab.
After exporting to Alembic and importing in Keyshot the sequence looks great.
Attached are two screenshots of the KS animation and the latest version of the C4d model.