FBX to Three.js converter

[Ross McKegney]

Spreading the word - if you want to work with FBX and Three.js, we've just made it a lot easier.

http://verold.com/blog/2012/11/27/designing-the-fbx-converter-for-threejs

Be sure to check out the embed video, one of the most upbeat code demos you've seen in awhile :)

[Kenneth Russell]

Excellent! It seems that Autodesk is standardizing on FBX as an
interchange format between all of their products, and making it easy
to use assets in WebGL via Three.js will make it much easier for
designers and artists to produce 3D content for the web. Thank you for
open sourcing this, and looking forward to seeing more functionality
come in over time!

-Ken

[Tony Parisi]

Without animation, this will be just another model converter. Animation would be more than handy, I would say it's essential. At least for interactive applications.

Tony

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 1:46 AM, Evan Boehm <eva...@googlemail.com> wrote:

Any plans for including animation? We'd got pretty far when we tried to convert FBXs but fell at that last hurdle. We used morph targets instead which wasn't ideal:

http://thecarpandtheseagull.thecreatorsproject.com/

Animation would be ridiculously handy.

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[Ross McKegney]

We're working on animation, that was the main driver for us to switch over to FBX from our current pipeline. Won't be long...

[Tony Parisi]

Awesome to hear that, Ross. Keep us posted!

Tony

[Mark Wang]

Looks great -- and yes, animation would be great for us as well.

Also, has there been any thought to combining this with Fabrice's COLLADA2JSON work?

We're working with large models/constrained runtime environments, so a binary blob with the actual mesh data would be much more efficient than text JSON.

If we can combine that with the convenience of using FBX straight from our tool, that would make our day.  ;)

Mark

[Ross McKegney]

Hi Mark,

We have the same considerations - many of our models were not originally designed for realtime, and are extremely high poly. We built the FBX converter as plumbing to our platform, but then do post-processing to generate a binary format that we deliver to the client.

Take a look at Verold Studio, and particularly where we're going with it:

http://verold.com/blog/2012/11/6/threejs-needs-a-cms

Maybe we can be part of your solution?

Ross

[Mark Wang]

Hmm... so are you guys using another binary format and implemented a three.js loader for it?  

If I understand correctly, you're already doing the JSON text -> binary conversion as a subsequent step in your export pipeline.  If so, are you going to open source that as well?

Mark

[Ross McKegney]

Hi Mark,

That's an interesting thought, but probably not...

We're using the binary format for performance (many of our meshes are hundreds of thousands of polys), but also to shield us from changes in Three.js. We expect our models to be around for a long time, and having our own transfer format and loader gives us a bit more flexibility on when and how to adopt changes and new features in the Three.js format. We're keeping the core converter open, because we think everyone can benefit from it. But the binary format and custom loader are proprietary extensions for our specific usecase. 

Ross

[Peter Ehrlich]

Any updates on this? Cross reference: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/4385

[Andre Weissflog]

Not directly related, but I started an N-to-M 3D data converter package in python where FBX is one of the main input formats. It's very early and progress is slow since it's developed in parallel to a new 3D engine, but it might be useful for others to start hacking with FBX. No animation and skinned character support yet, but some other important stuff is in already, such as merging/splitting mesh nodes by materials:

https://github.com/floooh/drahtgitter

Cheers,

-Floh.