Since CryEngine 3.6.17 (and some previous versions) now has FBX importer, I am wondering if anyone tried Blender > FBX > CryEngine workflow for animated and static meshes.
I’d be interested in this too. Crysis is an interesting & powerful engine, but it’s focus (for which it is @#$%ing amazing) is not towards the game I wish to make.
There ya go: http://www.cryengine.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=315&t=103136 
Blender > CryEngine direct export. Supposedly works.
I’ve a few things on the forum and I am not willing to get sucked into this trap. I will probably poke at it (maybe make a map for Crysis 2) for portfolio / resume reasons, but I don’t think it’s healthy for development, especially for a lone indie.
it’s pretty rough to use?
I haven’t used it. Although did read a lot online about devs struggling working with it. Here is the latest thing I’ve read:
http://www.cryengine.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=355&t=130210
Any engine that likes it’s indies, should really work with blender on a direct export without any nonsense.
Last I’ve seen, Valve and Epic have tried to directly fund the development of export tools from Blender that make use of the .fbx format.
The problem is, Blender .fbx development has to follow an incredibly clunky route that includes reverse engineering because the SDK is incompatible with the GPL, and I don’t see any commercial studio out there seriously considering support for the .blend format (which would definitively be the best way to go for people using Blender for their assets).
Valve has its own format, Cryengine has its own format and there are no issues supporting those. Valve’s Blender exporter is well known, and Cryengine’s I just linked above. When UDK had psk/psa format, there was no issue either.
Now, UE4 and Unity do not have own format. It’s FBX and FBX only and that’s the core issue, with UE4 at least.
Yeah I just wish they all added .blend support… how would it hurt them?
The blend file format is closely tied to blender and is basically a memory dump, which changes a little each release (once every 3 months or so).
Anyone trying to have good support will need to re-impliment large chunks of Blenders logic (constraints, modifiers, fcurves, ik’s, mesh customdata layers… etc).
Its not at all intended to be an interchange format, there is very good reason not to add blendfile support to 3rd-party applications.
blender is open source, so would that take very long?
how long would it take you if you were payed to do it and had their closed source?
Because GPL is not compatible with other proprietary licenses? It’s not possible, at all. Simply due to GPL license. Also, why don’t they all put Maya and Max inside their engines? Wouldn’t it be nice to just open .max and .mb files directly?
If format is plain and simple, or well documented, then it’s not a problem to implement. For example, idTech 4 has ascii model formats (ASE for static meshes and MD5 for skeletal). Not only it can be understood due to human readable format, but since there is engine’s source, it’s not hard to understand what is what. idTech 4 also supports LWO files for static models, and LWO format is very well documented.
@motorsep - GPL isnt necessarily a blocker, its even been done with a BSD license - see the GameKit which did it (but only has basic file-format support).
@BluePrintRandom, as for how long would it take… that depends on how good the support needs to be. For really good support its a time-sink, and you’d be better off creating your own intermediate format to export out of Blender.
Are you saying big chunk of Blender can make its way into UE4 / Unity / CryEngine so .blend files can be loaded directly ?
I can see it being done to a GPL engine, but I doubt it’s possible with non-GPL (or GPL compatible license) engines.
Im not especially interested to have some long licensing discussion - for practical purposes I don’t think the GPL really has much/any impact here. Because they would probably re-implement it using there own language/API’s anyway.
To put it differently, they are free to use the GameKit’s code (which isn’t GPL), but getting good support is still a massive task, (IMHO) a bad idea too… so - I can see why game engines aren’t doing it.
You might as well ask why GPL engines don’t copy-paste Blender’s entire animation system… They could in theory but they don’t… typically you can’t (easily) copy-paste large integrated systems between code-bases like this.
Same situation for moving Krita’s painting system into Blender’s image editor.
Since FBX has licensing issues, what are the chances we’ll see these game engines supporting the Alembic format? Do they support it already? Seems like this would solve Blender’s FBX issue once Alembic gets implemented finally. I don’t know enough about the format, so I don’t even know if it’s possible or not.
Alembic doesn’t support skeletal animation AFAIK. So it’s useless for real-time rendering.
UE4 just needs a direct import of blend format.
Lol, we just discussed it yesterday and that will never happen
I wonder if there is an app that can load up another skeletal format (one that would be really easy to implement in Blender) and export it into FBX that complies with UE4/Maya/MAX.
There is Noesis, http://www.richwhitehouse.com/index.php?content=inc_projects.php, but I haven’t used it much and I don’t know if it exports good FBX files.
Not completely useless by reading through their slides, Crytek made heavy use of Alembic for Ryse.
Example video, export from Maya alembic file:
Full slides
http://www.crytek.com/download/Ryse_SIGGRAPH_2014_Sascha%20Herfort_GeomCaches%20f or%20VFX%20in%20Ryse.pdf