Hello,
I work in the video game industry and I use FBX files on a daily basis on my projects. My entire studio does, and I’m sure most studios do as well.
Blender is a great tool, but it’s terrible at handling large FBX files, most of the time it takes minutes to load when it’s not crashing.
I won’t mention the fact that it only supports specific types of FBX files (between 2011 and 2013 if I recall correctly), everything else won’t work.
I would like to know if there are plans to improve usability of FBX format in the future, that’s one of the things that remains problematic to become an industry standard.
Even addons can’t solve the loading and crashing issues.
Blender cannot use autodesks API for fbx. instead ideasman had to use a “reverse engineered” version of the spec. When autodesk changes version it breaks the blender implementation hence the limited format restriction.
Apps that use fbx api don’t have these issues but that’s sadly not doable with blender’s licence.
I also work in games and haven’t found issues with the import times on huge scenes or crashes though. The conversion is handled by a code module rather than python so it’s probably about as fast as it’s going to get.
I do find that I can set 3ds max to export to a blender compatible fbx version
I think that little bit more reverse engineering and maybe that animation scale thing and other issues can be fixed too so it is not needed to change unit scales anymore. Quite annoying and distracting that you have to mess with scales when you want keep world scale in real scales.
Someone with skills could fire up reverse engineering tools and fbx could improve more.
Animation is certainly an issue atm.
Importing camera animation is completely broken, and not on the to-do list for the foreseeable future.
We can only hope that Epic is willing to put some muscle behind these import-export issues, as they’re actively working on getting stuff from Blender into Unreal.
I was talking about importing FBX camera animation into Blender from other applications, that part is broken.
Especially when the camera output + markers from a tracking application are under a parent node, which is often the case.
We tried every trick in the book to get something into Blender that looks like the tracked camera, but always the axes are flipped, or scaled or completely in a different location all together.
Haven’t tried it lately, but even in 2.81 it was unusable.
I’m new to Blender and, really, all of this stuff, and running into lots of problems with this kind of thing. Has any progress happened re: FBX? Is any on the horizon?
Is there an alternative format that handles at least character rigging and animations that is compatible with blender, that I should look for?
The obj importer will get a big speed update, so maybe its possible to change? Alembic and USD might also be an option?
FBX is really annoying to code an importer/exporter. Thats why there is not much changing and will only get bug fixes since nobody wants to do it… Its not blenders fault though because its a closed system.
USD is currently in development but will be used in the future in my opinion… Something needs to replace FBX its just annoying…
Alembic is better implemented but will also get a revamp in 2.9 to be better there also was a blog post about it.
Not sure what you are using but unreal engine made a live link that should come out soon.
I am at the point where I don’t know what to use, so I’m trying to figure out which programs will place nice together before I get involved with them. Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of ‘convenience’ programs like Character Creator 3 don’t have solid Blender-friendly options. I hope we see more focus on this kind of integration from Blender, because most paid applications either don’t care or really don’t want to integrate their stuff with Blender.
If I thought I was going to live longer, I’d just focus entirely on Blender, but I’d like to get to my actual projects before I die.