Importing FBX animation data

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi there,

relatively new to Blender, have been testing it for general tasks so far, but now I tried to import FBX data into Blender.

Using 2.76 final.

I tried using Mixamo free animations, and skeleton structure from Mixamo seems to be pretty correct IMO, but yet it doesn’t seems to be importing properly into Blender.

I could only find very few links / articles about importing FBX data so if you have any links related to this subject, those would be much appreciated!

Please note that this data seems to be otherwise valid data, it reads and exports correctly to other software.

Issues:

  1. First try with default FBX importer settings. Complete mess. Skeleton bone alignment is flipping in all kinds of ways.

  2. Went to Armatures tab of import options. I went through x,y,z as main axis and the same for secondary axis, yet importer doesn’t seem know how interpret rotations in correct manner. It seems it’s not possible to get parent-child oriented bone connections?

  3. I also tried “Automatic Bone Orientation” it seems to somehow be able to align x axis along parent-child joint axis. But it’s beyond me how manual axis selection won’t be able to do same?
    Maybe I didn’t try all possible combinations. Problem with this is, some extremities are aligned incorrectly. Finger and foot bones don’t connect to each other, they seem to point to some arbitrary “not set” direction, be it parent or world direction I didn’t check.

  4. Using “Force Connect Children” made extremities look connected, however it completely messed up top level root node animation graph, simple walk along line was messed up and starts to sink into ground instead of walking ahead on ground.

  5. There is an option to “Ignore Leaf Bones” but this doesn’t seem to do anything, or it does something else I expect it to do - there will be some empty nubs/locators/nulls like “headTop_end” floating in scene after import, they don’t even have the scale of imported rig? How should this option work?

  6. Experimental “Apply Transform” didn’t seem to do anything even to visual resemblance of “correct import” so I didn’t experiment more with it.

So, to me it seems standard import settings are totally off, tried resetting them a couple of times. Is there more information available about FBX importer, or is it somehow unfinished? Is there alternative FBX importer/exporters that are up to date and can import data without issues.

Thanks in advance!

2

Is there more information available about FBX importer,
Documentation linked from the addon http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Import-Export/Autodesk_FBX

3

Thanks, but I think I already checked that documentation a week or so ago and I don’t see what I should make of it.

Is there something specific info that I might have missed…?

There is only minimal information about importing. More about exporting and test cases of exported scenes. However I’m at this point only interested in importing, otherwise I can’t create proper round trip between different software.

What little info there is about importing, page mostly just mentions that it should work at least with basic animation.

Page only mentions about FBX importing that Blender should be able to import animation data (talking only about joints and rotation/position/scale data nothing else) and there might be some visual issues that should be fixable by user.

And it seems like the page is bit outdated, where is the other experimental version of FBX importer/exporter?

4

Hi again,

I’ve done more FBX import tests, some questions.

Seems like built in FBX importer wants to keep some joints separated yet parented after importing into Blender.

I got a standard humanIK skeleton file which should be fine, but when imported into Blender, it will have non-connected joints mostly on other side of x-axis and in spine.

For example, in this case left side of rig seems to have proper connections between knee and elbow, but identical right side does not. Same for spine, but in addition to being not connected, bone tips (which ever they are, the pointy end) go past next bone start position. And original file does not have these features.

This can be manually fixed or maybe later I could try creating a script to fix it, but does anyone have idea why this happens?

Is this a known bug / weakness of FBX importer?