Using .fbx exporter for XNA

Support Other Software
1

Hi,
I’ve very recently started looking at blender again after a couple of years doing other things. My interest is with xbox 360 development, so I am taking a look at how the .fbx exporter has been improved and am looking to replace my existing md5 based workflow to use .fbx.

To start with, I decided to take a simple standard model and to that end chose to use the rat from the yofrankie svn repo. The file in question is rat_actions.blend in the chars directory.

I figured out pretty early on that because it uses a proxy, there are 2 rigs in the code and that causes issues when exporting. So, to get around that, I select the non-proxy object and export that without animation (i.e. just rig and mesh). I then select the proxy object and export just the animations. In all cases I selected the ‘xna strict options’ in the exporter.

To view the exported model, I used the model-prep app:
http://code.google.com/p/3d-model-prep/

The model of the rat loads fine and looks great. When I load the animations though, it is a mess. The rest pose is fine but all the animations are seriously messed up. It looks like there is a rotation or transformation too many in there.

Can anyone help with what I am doing wrong?

Thanks,

Ian

2

I’ve never exported anything to XNA and I haven’t checked the rat in question. But if you have control armature and actual deforming armature then you may want to export only the optimized deforming armature with animations and mesh. I guess the other rig is only for animator and is never intended to reach a game engine of any kind.

Maybe you can try the normal FBX exporter and see what you get.

3

More likely to get XNA specific answers on the XNA forums. Unfortunately I have never tested a model with more than one armature.

I would suggest deleting one of the armature and then making sure the animations still play in Blender. Export using just the rig that still works.

Regards

4

Has the Yofranke rig actually been updated for blender 2.59 given the many animation changes that have been made to 2.5 since yofrankie was released. Have you tried a rig that you know works correclty with the version of blender you are using. Also read the fbx exporter wiki for notes on compatibility

5

The reason there are 2 armatures is that the model and armature is linked to another .blend file … so one is a ‘proxy’. As I understand it, they are both exactly the same … it’s just that the exporter exports both of them rather than just the proxy one. I don’t think that is the issue though - I think there is some rotation or something in the bones that should not be there.
The exporter is the normal FBX one … I’m using 2.59 and in that version they are unified.

I plan to look at the animation in some other FBX tools later … just need to find one that can deal with the model being in a different file than the actual animation.

6

I don’t know … but the animation looks just fine in blender itself, so I assume it is ok.

7

So I think the issue is that the exporter exports both the original linked armature and the proxy armature when it should really just export the proxy one in this case. I don’t know if that is a general case or not - I suspect it would be an issue whenever the mesh / rigging is in one blender file and the actions are in another.
I’ll have a hack at the python when I get time to confirm that is the issue.