Hello,
So I created a fairly complex animation of an object breaking up and then the pieces begin to orbit around it. I used Empty objects as a parent for the pieces for the orbiting part of the animation. Around 100 pieces in total, and the same amount of empties. When I try to export it as a .fbx Blender stops working, it doesn’t technically crash but it stops responding and goes into “thinking” mode. Does anyone have any ideas about what could be the problem? Should I have used bones instead of empties? Or should I just give it some time to hopefully complete the export. (I am trying this now, and blender is slowly ramping up memory usage)
Thanks.
There are a few different options for this. Likely with FBX you are running into an issue of having to calculate and bake the animations. Also you have several objects all with an action. So as far as fbx is concerned you have 100 objects and actions, and keyframes times however many frames in the animation. So this would explain the wait and also all of the ram usage.
Also depending on your settings, for example if you used “experimental apply transforms” this has bugs with parenting and empties.
If you also had constraints, those won’t come across with the .fbx.
So any number of things could make this take longer or simply not work.
In the future, maybe bones (One single Armature object with multiple bones) are better. One Action and easy to manage.
But in this case you can also simplify by selecting all of the objects (not the empties) and bake the animation.
If you use these settings you can clear out any constraints and parenting and bake everything down to the object. And this will probably be more reliable. Then only export the objects.
For FBX these are the settings I would use:
Select and export only the objects. Don’t chose all actions because that can add all of the actions in the file you don’t need. These settings will automatically include only the Actions for the objects selected.
This method should make the export process more reliable and might even take less time and ram to complete.
1 Like
Thank you Richard!
This worked perfectly and I will definitely be taking your advice in the future about using a single armature object with multiple bones. I may have gone overboard with the amount of empties I was using. Your guide made the whole thing export in just a few seconds.
Thanks again.
1 Like
