FBX+ for importing user properties and more

Community Showcase Film, TV & Animation
1

Hi all,

I’ve released a plugin for importing user properties from FBX into Unreal.

FBX+ was originally developed by Plastic Ant for our own needs, we required the user properties and splines from the 3DS Max / Maya files transfering into the Unreal Editor via the FBX file format.

FBX+ works by creating an empty Blueprint per-imported model, within each of these Blueprints member variables are created and assigned the values from the FBX data. If any of the properties are animated FBX+ will create curves and can assign them to that model’s animation sequence and or be used within the Blueprint timeline node. The plugin also supports cameras and splines, these are created through the standard Unreal Engine Editor code and don’t require additional classes or code.

Features:

• FBX+ works along side the standard FBX importing pipeline within the Unreal Editor. All options for FBX+ will appear within the standard import panel.

• Supports all user properties from FBX.

• Supported properties are float, bool, int, string and colour properties.

• Property animations are also imported (linear, constant and cubic) currently for float, vector and colour. Animated properties are created as curves with the option to assign them to animation sequences, FBX+ can also create them for use with Blueprint Timelines if prefered…or both.

• Supports additional FBX standard properties (e.g. bounding size, wireframe enabled, visible, renderable, cast shadow).

• FBX+ will create a folder for any data created by the import to help keep the additional import data tidy.

• FBX+ will create a new blueprint for storing the FBX+ data associated with each object.

• Variables can also be imported from the 3ds Max text based user properties (from the object right click context menu) by using ‘=’ and or ‘:’ assignment.

• Works with the source builds and the offical release builds, no Engine code modification is required.

Supported FBX Nodes and their properties (more to come):

• Splines: FBX+ will create and populate Blueprints for imported splines.

• Cameras: FBX+ will create and populate Blueprints for imported cameras, imports values for DOF, aspects, look at location, projection type and more.

3DS Max FBX+ Plugin (coming soon…Maya in the future):

We’ve also developed a suite of additional FBX data plugins for 3DS Max and we intend to ship a general version with the FBXPlus Unreal Plugin soon with additional plugins for sale (e.g. Shader / material animation). They currently support note tracks, shader / material parameter animations, MassFX (PhysX) properties, audio tracks and lots more.

Researching features:

• Support for bone attachments as sockets.

See it in action: (earlier version, new video coming soon)

[video]Unreal Engine Plugin: fbx+ - YouTube
http://plasticant.co.uk/site3/index.html?#FBXPLUS

I welcome feedback, so if there’s any other data you’d like to see imported from FBX I’d be interested to hear.

Thanks,
Mike

2

Great stuff! With a proper setup this can be a great time saver.

I’m especially looking forward to seeing “Support for importing of cameras” ! Will it work with target cameras? How about different transform controllers, or modificators? As far as I know, you can’t export such data to FBX.

Can you elaborate a little bit more about “parameter animations”? Do you plan to create some kind of a custom asset in Unreal Engine for that?

3

Hi,

Thanks for your interest!

The first stage with cameras is going to be the standard camera set up via FBX, so a Camera Actor will be created with as many settings as I can pull across (FOV etc, I don’t see why not for target cameras but I’ll need to think about that some more) as for more complex controllers and parameter animations, if I go down that route the plugin will have a Max (and maybe Maya) plugin that can be used along side but not required…once I have that in place nearly any data can be pushed through, so Custom assets may come into play at that point.

Mike

4

Thanks for the answer. Max’s Target Camera (not sure about Maya) uses Look-at constraint which drives its rotation (camera itself has “Roll Angle” controller). I tried to recreate that in UE via Blueprints but got stuck and left this for now.

Anyway, good luck with your plugin.

Michal

5

Will keep an eye on this as I’m currently trying to fix my import pipeline and streamline it as much as I can.

6

This seems like just what I’ve been looking for. I’ve poked around looking for some sort of extra data import tool, even parsing a text file written out from Maxscript… But I am not a blueprints master. I purchased the plugin and see that there is so much data there. Bounding box and all kinds of goodies… but I really don’t know UE well enough to take advantage of this.

Would it be possible to construct a material for an object via custom property variables in FBX+ ? I’m looking for a way to recreate Max materials in UE. I am a very advanced maxscript user and can pipe whatever properties I want into the userProps of each object. I would love to export the bitmap paths to all of the various texmaps in Max and then generate materials in UE from those variables. Is this feasible? Or am I crazy?