How to export simulated muscle animation to a game engine?

[raincole]

I'm making a monster for Unreal Engine. I'd like to have some realistic, physics-based animation on its muscles. I don't know if Houdini is the right tool for this.

There is a new Muscles & Tissue system, which looks very powerful, but how am I going to export this to a game engine?

I know it's impossible to have a real-time realistic muscle sim in a game engine, so I plan to make the animation & simulation in Houdini. But how could I export it to Unreal? Alembic files are way too large, and generally very hard to work with game engine features like character controller.

Is it possible to somehow export the simulated muscle some game-engine-friendly skeleton animation? Like a normal skeleton rigging + some morph targets? Or "bake" the simulation into bone weights? (I don't know if such magic exists).

Could someone share their experience on this topic?