Woot! Blender 2.71 has updated FBX!

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

OK…

So, today I downloaded Blender’s testbuild 2
://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.71/

And then was having fun baking with cycles :cool:
[SIZE=2]And then exported my FBX and imported into Unreal
AND then saw this:

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*There is nothing wrong with your television set.
Do not attempt to adjust the picture.
You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to
The Outer Limits * cue song

*We’re finally getting an FBX update!

2

so they finally got round to it, that’s awesome news:), fingers crossed one has no issues;)

3

Awesome news! :slight_smile:

4

yep just as blender up-grade to fbx 2013 , UE4 upgrades to fbx 2014 !!!

looking forward to testing it out

5

well it looks like blender is exporting to fbx 2014 files so we should be good on that now:).

I have just done some testing and there is some good and bad news.

good news.

1: it no longer adds the extra bone (unless you export to fbx version 6.2).

2: it doesn’t rotate the bones axis like it used to (again, unless you export to fbx version 6.2).

3: everything seems to work as expected, but as I don’t have UE4.2 I couldn’t test it with the 2014 importer.

4: blender now has the option to export fbx file 6.2 or 7.4.

bad news.

1: I got the “invalid bind pose” error when importing.

2: it adds the name of the armature to the bones, so if you have the root bone called lets say “” when in UE4 it will be named “Armature|”, if you change the name of the armature it will change the name in UE4 as well.

3: blender can only import fbx 2014 (as far as I can tell static meshes only still).

4: there is no “Default Take” option anymore.

I think that’s everything:p, so it looks like it still has a couple of small issues but the files still work;)

6

Thanks for the update ! I only got to play with static meshes last night

Another bad news :frowning:
No shapekeys with 7.4 binary export
I just imported my rigged mesh morning with shapekeys and they don’t appear in morph list although they still import with ASCII

7

I can’t run Blender on my Win8.1; have no clue why.

8

Yeah, we are really happy with all of this :slight_smile: Still working on making it better and talking with Blender about it too.

9

Not that I can actually model or have UE4, that is some great news. Blender is a pretty awesome piece of software and kind of shows they are picking up pace :smiley:

10

blender will import older fbx files BUT they must be in binary format and not ASCII , so far in some cases i’ve imported the skeletal rig but as objects and not as an armature :frowning: though you could go through the painfull process of creating a rig and aligning the bones to the objects, may be an option then for using the UE4 characters

from
“1: I got the “invalid bind pose” error when importing.”

i get that from fbx as well so its not a blender problem, i think i saw a post on the answer hub that mentioned its fix on the internal build !!!

11

oh so that means there is only 2 small issues with it, shape keys and adding the name of the armature to the name of each bone, although I could live with the name thing;)

12

Good to see it’s finally in an official build. The first versions of the new binary exporter are available since 6 months, although armatures made it in not that long ago.

For anyone interested check the blender page and blog of :
://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:/Foundation/2014
://.wordpress/

If you get issues try to report these through the bug tracker.

13

Hmm, I was having issues with animations coming without the ‘include default take’ option checked. I just got the current github version of the plugin configured to where it works well so I am not going to upgrade anytime soon I don’t think. Using an out of date version of FBX isn’t a problem in and of itself really, but it’s nice to know the plugin is being actively maintained! Good news all around!

14

ok done another quick test, looks like we’re stepping back wards atm with this, when exporting a skel mesh which uses the rigify rig all the bones get exported there is no option to choose deform bones only !!!

really limits what sort of rig people use, shame really

15

The blender developer posted a blog on here ://code.blender.org/index.php/2014/06/supporting-game-developers-with-blender-2-71/

For exporting from blender to UE4 he says:

What works (in blender 2.71):

  • Static meshes (including UVs)
  • Skeletal meshes
  • Skeletal mesh animations (including IK constraints)
  • Flat and smooth shading
  • NGons
  • Exporting materials (materials will be created in UE4 with the name and color of the exported material, and embedded diffuse textures will be setup)
  • Exporting meshes as collision meshes (they must be named UCX_XX, where XX is the name of the mesh that the collision mesh is for)

What doesn’t work:

  • Exporting whole levels (you’ll need to export individual assets and put them together in UDK)
  • Shape key animatons
  • Object animations

Notes:

  • Textures must be powers of two and a support image format (JPEG isn’t supported, but PNG is)*
  • The default axis options work (Forward: -Z Forward, Up: Y Up), but scaling should be set to 100.0
  • UDK complains about an incompatible FBX version (UE4 uses 7.3.0 while Blender exports 7.4.0), but things seem mostly fine
  • Collision meshes can also be created in UE4 (i.e., you don’t have to rely on importing a collision mesh)
16

just tested the blender-2.70-b707b07-win64 build, deform bones is back and works , but the bones all get prefixed by “rig|”

i’ve reported it on his blog so hopefully he’ll fix for us :slight_smile:

17

Hopefully ill have a new script ive been working on for a modified riggify rig tool that ive based of the epic rigs in the example characters but still works with makehuman & Motion Capture. I ****** hate Python, never nothered learning it so bit slow going right now. Good to know Blender might become a usable tool out the box soon for Game Dev. :slight_smile:

://s8.postimg.org/xph51269d/Bad_Lama_Badgesmall.png

18

Does effect the process of importing into UE4 in any way? I’m still trying to figure out how to get from Blender to UE4. And I’m new to Blender. But I managed to model some things. How do I re-scale the models I’ve already made so they work for UE4. And is it possible to keep the animations, or will they be completely screwed up by re-scaling? And lastly, the thought of doing UVs twice for everything is giving me anxiety. I read something about a separate UV unwrapping for lightmaps where nothing is overlapping. Is really a necessity? I HATE texturing.

And as more of a matter of opinion I guess: don’t you want to be able to use shape keys for facial animation? Or would you get by with basic puppet-work with armature bones?

In short, should I start pulling my hair out for having spent all time learning Blender or can I salvage my work for UE4?

19

the idea behind the update , i believe is to aid us in the process of getting the blender content into UE4,

yes static meshs need a second uvw map but you can just re pack your uv’s so that there are no over laps, mention in my udk-blender videos

still not sure with blender anims, but the mesh/rig you can scale up in blender then apply the scale/rotation before you export, best check your anims before you export with the scaled rig. afaik you can scale up on import but not sure if thats the best way or weather it works with anims.

i suppose shape keys would be nice but since i’ve never used them i’m not sure how you would put these together in UE4

we’ve all been at that stage no matter which program we use but where there is a will there’s a way :wink:

20

Thanks! One last thing, I see you can import things with animations on models that are rigged, but what about things without a rig? I made an elevator and animated the door opening and closing. Can I import those actions? I thought it’d be easier than programming that in UE4 (though programming a door is the easiest thing to program).