Autodesk Maya: Exporting to FBX

April 8, 2011 under 3D • 4 Comments

For Senior Project at school, I was responsible for modeling and animating 3D fishes. The app that we were using required me to export the models into FBX file. I learned the hard way that exporting to FBX is a HUGE pain in the butt, and hopefully this article can smooth things out for anyone working with Maya & FBX.

Thing to keep in mind when exporting to FBX

  • Deformer animations simply do not work. I’ve browsed through many, many forums looking for a solution but could not find an answer. What happens is that once exported to FBX, only the first frame will have the deformers applied, but not for any frames after that. This means that for the rest of the animation, the object being deformed will maintain the same shape from the first frame.
  • Blend shapes work! You just have to re-arrange the Input Orders (explained later)
  • Constraints may not alway work. I used parent constraints for my eyes and some of the controls, but they would do odd things when exported. For example, even though they’d work perfectly as an .mb file, in the FBX file there would be an offset on the objects that were constrained, so they wouldn’t be in the right positions.
  • You have to delete non-deformer history after you smooth your mesh. Otherwise, even when your model is exported, it will still be unsmoothed.
  • Make sure all your normals are facing the right way. To see normals, go to Display > Polygons > Face Normals. Not having the normals pointing the right way will mess up many things in the app/game, primarily the lighting.

Below, I’ve outlined the steps to properly export an FBX file. There is also a supplementary video that may help you get started. At this point, you should have the character modeled, textured, the joints and controls set up, and the mesh for any blend shapes created.

initial setup

Fig. 1: The initial setup
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Boomi: 3D Animation

December 23, 2010 under 3D • 2 Comments

On Monday I finally finished my fall semester, and one of the many things that I worked on was a 3D animation. Throughout the semester we learned to model, rig, weight, and animate in Autodesk Maya, and our term project was to create a 3D animated short.

Here is the final animation, enjoy :)

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the result, but I wish I had more time to improve on certain areas. In particular, I want to improve the animations and timing. I was never trained in traditional animation, and I find most of Boomi’s animations a little ‘floaty’. In the future I’d like to study more about animation in order to get that tight animation that you see in Pixar movies. I would also like to have better voices and sound effects.

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