Importing animated characters into Blender? (FBX... no...?)

Hello,

I’ve been working with CG since 1999 and finally I’m taking steps to switch to Blender. I wanted to start by rendering my latest work assets with Blender (on Linux). These are animations done in Motion Builder and exported to a game engine using Maya. I’ve been searching the net and forums in my spare time on the last couple of days and found out that the most probable way to import animated characters into Blender would be with Collada.

I installed Collada from Feeling Software on Maya, exported .dae, but I cannot import it in Blender, it gives an error and to check the console (which I don’t know yet where it is).

I was trying the FeelingViewer, but I think I did not installed cglibs correctly yet (or it needs a reboot). Yes, I’m on Linux.

Any ideas of what else I could try? The characters have baked animations, so each bone have one keyframe in each frame, no fancy curves for later edition or anything.

And while we are at it, arethere any plans to support FBX Import on Blender?

It’s becoming the standard on the industry, specially on animation. I’ve seen complex pipelines where people would switch characters between max, maya and motion builder using FBX without much problems.

Thanks,
eks

it gives an error and to check the console (which I don’t know yet where it is)

When you start Blender out of an terminal it will show the console-output.
Simply open a terminal and type “blender”.

I can’t help but agree an FBX importer supporting animation would be an excellent advantage for Blender I know we have the FBX exporter with meshs and materials and the armature support is being worked on but to do an Importer would only add to Blender being taken seriously by the users of the leading “proffesional” software, further supporting Blenders intergration into a proffessional production pipeline.