My workflow is to animate in Maya then export my animation as alembic (skeletal mesh) to UE4 , I still have issues with importing alembic inside the engine
There is a weird trick you can try when your alembic files dont work well with unreal.
Load your alembic file in blender, and export it to alembic again.
For some reason blender and unreal like eachothers alembic files.
it takes time and space to import and now it seems octane doesn't like alembic animation files
Could be more specific on what Octane dosnt seem to like? Octane should support skeletal meshes, blendshapes and geometry cache.
That being said, unreals alembic implementation isnt very mature, and might cause annoying artifacts that get transferred over to octane.
is there a better workflow ?! , we use alembic because of blendshapes
Geometry caches are more generic and are a better fit between alembic and unreal. They should also work better in octane.