Contract work for making a blender exporter

[GustavoM]

Congratulations, this last version works just perfect
I have tryed it with Cheetah3D, Maya 8.5 and Unity 1.6, and it worked fine in all of them.
Thank you so much for this great work, I know for sure a lot of users will be way happy.

Only one more little detail, If I can ask for it

Blender´s coordinates system is the opposite of the one in Unity, so that when you import an object you cannot simply rotate it for getting the same coordinates as native Unity objects. One of them is right-handed and the other is left-handed, if you know what I mean. And this is often important when you are scripting transforms, so it would be needed some kind of coordinates mirroring function inside the exporter. Would this be a lot of work for you? I can send you more info if needed.

Thank you again, and best regards.

[drjones]

thanks so much ideasman ; )

i'll be testing it out with unity in my free time over the weekend - i'll let you know my experiences good, bad or otherwise.

[mcbeth]

@ ideasman do you have notes on the format based on your tests and research and are you willing to put them up somewhere, I interested in trying my hands at a loader sometime in the future. and that mihgt be helpful.
thanks in advance

[GustavoM]

I just could not resist anymore, I needed to watch some of my models inside Unity

And here they are:

http://www.gustavom.com/movies/anima...nimalsWeb.html

Regards.

[bigkahuna]

fantasic Work Cambo, Woohoo!!!

[dgebel]

You know, this thread might get more interest if it was titled "FBX Exporter" or something silly like that :-)

[ideasman42]

Hi guys, happy this is working for most people now !

Next planned features are...
* Batch exporter - export each group or scene as a FBX file.
* Add options for which axis is UP and global scaling.

Started wiki documentation - has info on what is/isnt exported and some details.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Sc...t/autodesk_fbx

[GustavoM]

Cool, thanks again man

[neilh1]

Originally Posted by GustavoM I just could not resist anymore, I needed to watch some of my models inside Unity And here they are: http://www.gustavom.com/movies/anima...nimalsWeb.html Regards.

Hey GustavoM, How much (if any) tweaking was required from exported files to what we see here (which look fantastic BTW) in Unity

Thanks again ideasman, yet another wonderful contribution,
n

[neilh1]

GustavoM, would be nice to see those on the Unity gallery.

[GustavoM]

Thank you very much

The only thing I had to do inside Unity was to re-link the texture files, because I did not use the default Unity convention. But UVs are imported fine, so I only had to select the files again. I also had to rotate the model 90º, but this issue is being worked for next release. As for the Unit gallery, I would prefer to finish better a more polished demo. And then it is a decision for OTEE guys...

[Moldorma]

This is great news! Unfortunately when I export a model with it and bring it in to Unity 1.6.2, a few of the vertices are stretched off into infinity. Here's a small sample model I exported:

http://www.box.net/shared/bfctryqh1c

Thanks for putting so much great work into this!

[ideasman42]

Moldorma, checked your model in motionBuilder and it looks fine, like a H shape.

Been testing a lot and have a new version coming with these bugs fixed....
* Scaled armatures bones were scaled twice
* Scenes with no world would raise an error
* Material indicies were incorrect (ack, still working on this one)

So if you find these bugs you dont need to report them.
Also some nice new features as well ;-)

[neilh1]

Originally Posted by GustavoM Thank you very much The only thing I had to do inside Unity was to re-link the texture files, because I did not use the default Unity convention. But UVs are imported fine, so I only had to select the files again. I also had to rotate the model 90º, but this issue is being worked for next release. As for the Unit gallery, I would prefer to finish better a more polished demo. And then it is a decision for OTEE guys...

That's cool.I am not a unity user (yet) but I am imagining that soon (when OTEE implements it) this should work natively like colada? ie you just point unity to the .blend scene and unity works our the rest?

[Moldorma]

But when I bring it into Unity I get this:

[ideasman42]

Moldroma, will post a version of your FBX you can test soon,
will be getting a mac tonight to test unity so hopefully can iron out these problems.

New version released!!
Additions
* added options for global scaling and rotating, defaults will load correctly in MotionBuilder
* modifiers can be applied to skinned meshes, the armatures are set to their rest positions for python to get the un-deformed mesh. This makes exporting a mesh with subsurf and armature applied work as expected.
* meshes with parent bones are exported as weighted meshes.
* use lamp modes for cast light and cast shadow FBX settings.
* batch exporter, scenes or groups can be exporter to a file each.
* help button to load the wiki exporter page.

Fixes
* material indices's were incorrectly exported
* export object materials using colbits
* scaled armatures would scale bones twice
* scenes with no world would raise an error

While writing this script I also found and fixed some bugs in blender, tooltips didnt display in the popup interface, getting armatures could cause memory errors, and curve objects were not converted to meshes as they should.

RC2 will be released very soon so if you see these problems, wait for RC2 to be released.



Grab it here
http://projects.blender.org/plugins/...r&pathrev=HEAD

[jezza]

Hey Ideasman, remember a while ago we were talkng about an FBX IMPORT fror blender? seems like you got the FBX export done, nice one well done, any thoughts on import?
cheers
j
ps can attach simple fbx text file if thats any help

[Frank Skilton]

Hi,

First off I wanted to say thank you for writing this FBX exporter, Blender needs a working solution to export animated meshes to a universal format.

I'm using a game engine that supports the Collada format and up until now none of the Collada plugins I've tried work. Both the native Collada exporter and the Illusoft one do not support skinned animations.

With this FBX exporter you have created I am hoping to use the Autodesk FBX Converter to convert to Collada. I've had some moderate success, I was able to use the FBX Converter to convert to Collada and import the file into my game engine - the bones and skinning come through fine as does the animation however I'm seeing a similar problem as others have reported, the mesh is being distorted upon applying the animation (similar to the picture above from the Unity user). The second problem I'm running into is that most of the FBX files produced by Blender and your plugin will crash the FBX Converter.

Here is an archive that contains two .blend files. The one named "blenderanimtest" is a simple boned animation that will crash the FBX Converter. The other file, named "Player" is another simple boned animation that successfully converts to Collada using the FBX converter however the mesh is stretched upon applying the animation.

http://www.sentinelgames.com/downloa...erExamples.zip

I would greatly appreciate it if you could take a look at my files and determine why they are not working. Once this FBX exporter is fully working expect to see a lot of love from the C4 Engine community!

P.S. The native FBX converter that ships with Blender really doesn't work very well, if at all. Will this new FBX converter replace it?

[ideasman42]

Updated the exporter, link is the same as above,
* texture indicies were incorrect.
* "Copy Textures" option didn't work.
* export blenders clampX/Y image options.

@jezza,
Ill write a section on the Wiki about how we might go about writing an importer, its not a simple problem and might have licensing issues if we use Autodesk's SDK. (Id really like it if others would help out more with maintaining blenders scripts.) - so Id prefer to help somebody else write the importer.

@Frank Skilton
Will look at your files, Its odd that only some apps show this problem, Im using motionBuilder as the benchmark because FBX is its native format, but I'll try to support others also.

This is an update to the exporter that ships with blender, they are the same script.

[ideasman42]

Frank, heres the file I exported from blender, with the latest exported as (from about 2 hrs ago). exported with default settings.

http://members.optusnet.com.au/cjbar...eranimtest.zip

It converts with the FbxConverter without crashing and reloading looks the same, also opened the FBX Exported from blender in C4D and it looks right too.