United3dArtists Archive

FBX exporter is not finished but good enough to be useful.

http://www.clintons3d.com/plugins/trues ... index.html"

I've run into a roadblock with skinning and skeletons so I decided to publish what I have so far. This is beta and it can crash truespace. See the notes on the site. I also put the source code for programmers. Not clean code but maybe can get some tips here and there.

So far skeletal meshes work well with Houdini and not so well with anyone else. Non-skeletal meshes work pretty well in most cases. I've done some testing with Unity and UDK game engines so it may be useful for that.

Very Cool Clinton!

The FBX Exporter Beta 2 is available.

http://www.clintons3d.com/plugins/trues ... index.html"

This one fixes the problem with skeleton skinning, rotations and animation. The trick was to make skeletons that had joints with yaw, pitch and roll all equal to zero. The first beta did this, but at the cost of a crumpled skeleton that gave bad skinning. An update to the Joint Orientation Script will prepare a skeleton so all it's joints have zero rotations, but with a good pose. The script can be used with the skin weight transfer tool to adjust preexisting characters/skeletal meshes that have already been skinned. The updated script can be found on the animations page:

http://www.clintons3d.com/plugins/trues ... index.html"

I've tested the plugin with Houdini, UDK, Unity and Carrara 7 and they all gave consistent results for skeletal meshes.

I recommend choosing FBX 6.0 when exporting. It gives the best results when used with several programs.

TODO/wishlist:
test non-skeletal animation
test other formats - obj, collada etc.
rework lights and camera's now that the rotations are worked out
option to export polygons(maybe just quads for simplicity)
option to ignore Skeleton_root node
option to not export the last joint in a chain
morph export
fbx importer

Great to hear Clinton! I was wondering how progress was going.

I released the final beta. It's not marked as beta though. I added options to export or not export the last joints in a chain(leaf joints) and the skeleton root which acts like an invisible joint in the first bone. I also added a button for removing all the IK handles and stops from a skeleton, since they are not compatible with the current exporter. A morph is no longer required for character mesh export. Lights and camera transforms are bad. My plan is to try to make FBX specific cameras and lights for truespace, but it's a low priority for now.

Next in the plan is to add error checking, so it doesn't crash if you do something like export a character with the IK handles still attached and to start the FBX importer.