Blender Format Support

[Consuelo Dular]

Ihave a FBX model which I would like to open in Blender but when I try to import the model it says: ASCII FBX files are not supported. Is there a way to import the model to Blender somehow? I don't have access to any Autodesk software.

You might be find that a lot of the solutions produce corrupt files when you open them in Blender (Paint3D, Autodesk Converter, etc) if they contain animations and armatures. The bones might look all messed up and the polygons can be broken.

This site has a good explanation. It says that ASCII format is human readable, contains all the model's info, but it's not Blender-readable. We need Binary format, and whoever makes the model needs to choose ASCII to give customers all the data, or they choose binary to make it importable to Blender. When they choose ASCII, we need to covert it ourselves. Supposedly there's a free tool for converting this using the Autodesk. I'm still looking around the Autodesk site for a free tool, but it may require some trial software. -for-architecture/import-ascii-fbx-files-blender/.

I tried connecting the tablet to the PC by USB. The files directly imported were still not recognized. Same error message: file format not supported. (In the Windows 3D viewer the obj was visible as colorless, the glb was in color but missing some parts.) In Blender 2.93 I have wave obj and glTF 2.0 import enabled.

sorry I only just read what was going on, yep - been there, done it. Not the only one! To upload pictures to the forum, hit the small icon with the arrow pointing up above these input text boxes (near the quotation mark icon) - or simply drag and drop a file/photo into these input boxes, both methods work.

Unity supports a number of proprietary model fileA file containing a 3D data, which may include definitions for meshes, bones, animation, materials and textures. More info

See in Glossary formats. You should not use these file formats in production; instead, export to the .fbx format wherever possible. For more information, see Model file formats.

Note: This page contains guidance on using proprietary file formats that use FBX conversion. However, there are two file formats that do not use FBX as an intermediary: SketchUp and SpeedTree. For more information about limitations with these file formats, see SketchUp Settings and SpeedTree.

When Unity imports a proprietary file, it launches the 3D modeling software in the background. Unity then communicates with that proprietary software to convert the native file into a format Unity can read.

You import files in the same way, regardless of whether they are generic or proprietary files. However, there are some differences between which features are supported. For more information on the limitations with a specific 3D application, see:

You can also configure the Lightwave AppLink plug-inA set of code created outside of Unity that creates functionality in Unity. There are two kinds of plug-ins you can use in Unity: Managed plug-ins (managed .NET assemblies created with tools like Visual Studio) and Native plug-ins (platform-specific native code libraries). More info

See in Glossary which automatically saves the FBX export settings you use the first time you import your Lightwave scene file into Unity.For more information, see the Lightwave Unity Interchange documentation.

Textures and diffuse color are not assigned automatically. You can manually assign them by dragging the texture onto the meshThe main graphics primitive of Unity. Meshes make up a large part of your 3D worlds. Unity supports triangulated or Quadrangulated polygon meshes. Nurbs, Nurms, Subdiv surfaces must be converted to polygons. More info

See in Glossary in the Scene ViewAn interactive view into the world you are creating. You use the Scene View to select and position scenery, characters, cameras, lights, and all other types of Game Object. More info

See in Glossary in Unity.

I know that some artists in the industry view blender as crap. But it is quite the capable 3D modeling tool. See the Blender Artists community for reference. Would it be possible to get a tighter integration between Blender and Unreal 4?

Yes it supports Blender, You export the file as an Autodesk .fbx file. I just tried importing a cube that I exported from blender and it worked fine. You can also choose options such as importing materials as well when you import it into UE4. Just get the Scaling how you want it in Blender before you export it to UE4 so you wont have to scale it up so much when you import it. I hope I helped.

For instance there are few important things to know when working with Blender and animations.

The first one is related to transforms in Blender, usually you apply all your transforms in Blender before exporting. Then you can play with Blender exporter options to modify this in a way you like for UE4 import.

For the bone issue, search in Google because an experimental FBX exporter based on the official one has been made wich introduce an option to setup bone orientations before exporting, thus without following the above destructive way of working. I used this one and it work for me.

I know it can be frustrating to loose time with things like this but we should find our tricks until the official Blender exporter will comes with more options that becomes usefull for one or another engine.

Would an exported BabylonJS file from Blender be significantly smaller than GLTF? I.e., might it just contain shape primitives rather than all of the pre-defined vertex information I assume is making up the majority of the BIN/GLB file?

I am pretty sure GLB in lines textures right into the file though. If you referred to using the .babylon exporter on 2.92, that might be a little bit premature. The last production version of the exporter was tested on Blender 2.83 LTS. I am in the process of getting the changes done for 2.93 LTS. I do not bother with the throw away Blender releases.

The size of the GLB/BIN file (>4MB) is still surprisingly large for what is essentially a big square room and some cylinders. Certainly orders of magnitude larger than the JS needed to create the same shapes manually. That leads me to think the majority of the file is individual vertices for the cylindrical objects rather than just descriptions of the primitive shapes.

Yes, glTF does have magical texture file compression that was just announced. You can find more information here: Khronos KTX 2.0 Textures Enable Compact, Visually Rich, glTF 3D Assets - The Khronos Group Inc. From there, you can get to this page: KTX Overview - The Khronos Group Inc which has a bunch of links at the top that has information about how to use KTX as well as how to create glTF asset with KTX.

There is an MSFT_lod extension for glTF that may help a little. The support for this in Babylon.js is only for progressive loading. There is an issue tracking using this for runtime rendering of LODs and an issue for screen coverage. Theoretically, this extension can also be used to load LODs based on bandwidth.

The issue seems to be most likely related to the material node tree in blender, as other have stated.

Usually, in order to export from blender with materials correctly most tools require the node tree to end in a single Principled BSDF shader node connected to the output.

Materials like glass, or more complex stuff usually requires mixed shaders, which should probably baked down to PBR texture maps.

Importing the glb file directly into Playground works and includes the textures, but when I import into blender, no textures are seen in the viewport. When I then export the Blender project back as a .glb file and import that into the Playground the textures are not present either. Thoughts?

Hello, I want to discuss whether or not it is worthit to write an exporter for a custom file format for a video game. I have tried writing my own Exporter for blender, and have had success with creating a mesh without animation support, however, as soon as I got into adding animation support, that really threw a wrench into things. I previously tried to write a file converter that converted collada files to my own custom format, however that resulted in duplicate UV coordinates, which I didn't want.

I'm thinking of giving up on writing an export script for Blender, since it doesn't have enough documentation or tutorials to do so. Looking at the other export scripts that come with blender doesn't seem to help much, and I feel that writing a converter would be more worthit. I might try writing a converter for .x format, but I want to know if anyone else has ever gone through this, and what your thoughts on the matter are.

The way this is usually done is that you use some standard export format from the 3D tool to read it into your game. In your engine, you should have some asset conditioning utilities, and this is traditionally where a conversion to a more efficient format takes place. You bake all of the data down to a tightly packed binary file that you know the structure of. This will remove all of the unneccesary information from the file, ensure that you can read the file in the order you initialize things, etc.

Sure supporting an interchange format like FBX is a must in the future, if you expect other people to make models. However writing such a tool is easy and quick (once the custom format has been established), so it can be done when it's needed (later). Since he's working alone, he can do whatever's most useful now.

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