Help Exporting with animations from Blender?

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kita
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon May 24, 2021 11:14 pm

Help Exporting with animations from Blender?

Post by kita » Tue Jun 08, 2021 9:34 pm

Greetings, I made a model with animations in monstermash. Saved as GLB > imported into Blender, everything looks good, the animations play fine in Blender. However once I attempted to export the model as FBX (or any file type) it always exports without animations. I really have no idea what I'm doing wrong, I've checked out some videos on exporting models with animation from Blender and I seem to be doing all the correct steps.

Any help?

kita
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon May 24, 2021 11:14 pm

Re: Help Exporting with animations from Blender?

Post by kita » Thu Jun 10, 2021 9:23 pm

My main goal has been to get the .GLB file from monstermash to be turned into a .FBX file and still retain the animations. So that I can put it into Unity. This has proven very difficult.

Importing into Blender, like I said above plays the animations but upon exporting as a .FBX it will lose all animation information. It is possible I'm doing something wrong here when exporting as I don't use Blender, but I've tried just about everything there is. I'll probably post on the Blender forums next.

I tried importing the GLB into many different 3d Modeling programs and none of them retained any animation information whatsoever on import.

Using Autodesk FBX converter converts the model but loses the animation.

Importing straight into Unity and GameGuruMax loses the animation as well. But really for best results it would need to be FBX in the first place.

Tried numerous online GLB to FBX converters, no luck.

AlanScot
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Jul 01, 2021 7:25 pm

Re: Help Exporting with animations from Blender?

Post by AlanScot » Thu Jul 01, 2021 11:51 pm

If Blender is able to export the animation alone ( as a .bvh) -- does that work ?

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dvoromar
Posts: 41
Joined: Tue Apr 20, 2021 2:23 pm

Re: Help Exporting with animations from Blender?

Post by dvoromar » Thu Aug 12, 2021 9:57 pm

Hi kita,

Monster Mash uses vertex-based animation (i.e., keyframed animation of individual vertices of mesh) instead of the traditional skeleton-based animation. Such animation is exported into glTF format using Morph Targets which are converted to Shape Keys in Blender. The problem you're describing may be caused by exporters, which may not support Shape Keys; or the output format itself may not support vertex-based animation.

If the output format does support vertex-based animation, you can try applying Shape Keys for each animation frame so that the animation is "baked" into vertices for each keyframe.

An alternative approach could be to convert vertex-based animation into the skeleton-based one using some external tool like Dem Bones (https://github.com/electronicarts/dem-bones).

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