Automate the creation of EC2 instance from a VMDK in an S3 Bucket?

Currently I'm using the VM Import/Export to manually stand up EC2 instances from VMDKs stored on an S3 bucket. While this is great for small scale use cases, I'd ideally like the ability to cram this into a CloudFormation template so I can scale/automate the process. My Google-Fu isn't strong enough for me to find the correct way of doing this, or if it's even possible so I'm hoping the folks that browse Re:Post might have some experience.

The ideal workflow would be having an S3 bucket full of VMDKs. Then uploading a CFT stack that would build the VPC, route table, subnets, yadda, yadda, yadda, then spin up instances based on the VMDKs. Any and all help is appreciated. Thanks!