New FBX import /export for blender

[Astrid Kaufmat]

Some of you ( the four or five cats) who have ever read my blurbing in this forum can remind  my hack to allow c4d users to rig their characters in cinema 4d and then use maya to export it to Secondlife in a compatible dae.

The big bet was now allowing anybody who used a software that was not maya to  bring in sl their riggged meshes.

By then I tried this hack with blender wondering how to help people using modo too or the 3ds max .

Now it seems that blender community has found a workaround to the propietary fbx,allowing  MAYA, 3dsMax, Cinema4d,MODOcheetah 3d,carara,unity 3d & others to share import export fbx files with their animations.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Import-Export/Autodesk_FBX

This llink shows you details.

After this all you need is to use an old version of any viewer that allowed to import on your pc the SL obj files of your avatars such as phoenix 2.5 to make your set of shapes according to the bonbes that should deform your avatar with fitted mesh

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Appearance_Editor_and_affected_bones

Here is the list of the bones.

To make those shapes I used this way I edited to maximum and to minimum value each slider that would control only the bones that affect the fitted mesh.

for istance:

Head stretch slider controls the HEAD  bone

Go on by this way for all the other sliders that affect the  collision bones only.

you can make two meshes starting from base ruth one with 0% and another with 100%

You will have by this way a set of shapes to use once properly rotated in your 3d viewer to build your shape keys or deformers sliders.Tadà nothing more cheap easy simple.

For those who have already got plugins all this madness could be avoided (enjoy your plugin and forget all this)!! For communists idealists like me, oh well, time to get hands dirty to start finally work properly with liquid/fitted mesh.

 

Now it's possible to rig by your software of choice and then use blender just to obtain the dae file compatible with SL as maya already did before.I'll startr my tests later ( I've just got the news of the blender plugin). Ah by the way as you can read on the wiki that fbx addon is not installed by default you'll have to enable it manually .

[Astrid Kaufmat]

I have already done that set of shapes anyway.I forgot to tell you that the basic male shape  is compatible with the ones rigged that you find on wiki.

yeah it's a mess, at least it seems so because you have to do the madness above for ruth and all its deformations you get and also for the male one, but also exciting.

Not that hard work anyway after positioned your shapes properly the rest is just fun playing with shape keys or morphs and those bones using the scale tool to make the rigged shape fit the model mesh avi for that specific bones that you're considering to make the slider for.

Another memento if you're using inworldz viewer it would allow to import your  avatar as well, but the orientation would be more messy than the one got with the old phoenix ( even if you get the referal shape as one piece instead of three( so less work to do later with empty objects to positionate them properly according to the riggged SL mesh avatars that you can get from the wiki page).

Another thing: if you are planning to get those referal obj shapes from inworldz another trick is to get a T pose made with your animation program of choice (class 4) to play while you save the obj

The trick I used to bring Ruth with me in open grid and in inworldz was just to save on a notecard the name of the sliders of the editing panel and the relative values.

 

[Astrid Kaufmat]

 

Here are the settings that for now I've found best working to import your rigged mesh from any other 3d application of your choice to Secondlife.

Maybe there are some better manual settings I am still sperimenting and testing them all but so far this new version of the fixed  "experimental fbx importer exporter" for blender works enough good to do the hack for now.

Once I have imported my mesh in blender I can use from tool shelf the  weight transfer tool to transfer weight to the new  clothes.

There is a problem with axis orientation but I think that this could be fixed by blender dae exporter thicking the secondlife box.

The second problem That I've noticed is that the clavicle bones are imported wrong, but this would take few clicks to adjust them.

As said in the 2.72 release notes now blender should import also shape keys and animations. Either way it's a good new cause to develope my almost universal opensource toolI could use keyframes animating deform bones to bring those deforms from an application to blender( in case the shape keys import wouldn't do the job) .

 

Still a lot to test butthis seems doing a better job than the previous total failure  importer that chained  immagination and creativity to the blender tyranny (especially for those who couldn't afford a 3000 $ software like maya,there are many others cheapers and some also f..cheaper).

[Gaia Clary]

hi;

In your first post in this thread you mentioned:

The big bet was now allowing anybody who used a software that was not Maya to  bring in sl their riggged meshes.

This confuses me a bit, because haven't there be many tools around since a long time which where able to create SL compatible rigged mesh Collada exports ?

You also mention:

Now it's possible to rig by your software of choice and then use blender just to obtain the dae file compatible with SL as maya already did before.I'll startr my tests later ( I've just got the news of the blender plugin).

Why wasn't this possible before ? I must admit that i am very focused on the Blender universe and i did not keep track on how other software would work or not work for SL.

So is Blender a tool that makes it easier to get rigged mesh to SL than other tools do ? Is that the reason why the new FBX Importer is so exciting ? Is the good news that you now can import from more tools to Blender and from blender create the final export files for SL ?

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

Same here, I've used 3ds Max for static mesh and rigged mesh from the very start in 2011 and recently fitted mesh and never ran into any real issues....

[RipleyVonD]

The FBX improvements makes Blender a more complete modeling suite. I second Gaia, and I think Blender does a very good job of creating things for SL.

I do appreciate your info for the FBX exporter Astrid, Thanks.

[Medhue Simoni]

---

Gaia Clary wrote:

You also mention:

Now it's possible to rig by your software of choice and then use blender just to obtain the dae file compatible with SL as maya already did before.I'll startr my tests later ( I've just got the news of the blender plugin).

Why wasn't this possible before ? I must admit that i am very focused on the Blender universe and i did not keep track on how other software would work or not work for SL.

So is Blender a tool that makes it easier to get rigged mesh to SL than other tools do ? Is that the reason why the new FBX Importer is so exciting ? Is the good news that you now can import from more tools to Blender and from blender create the final export files for SL ?

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The old FBX importer wouldn't import bones, at least for me, and all the figures I tried. The new importer does an OK job, but some bones are tiny and some are huge. I haven't played around with it too much. Oh, and it won't import a binary FBX. I'm sure there is more work to be done.

[Astrid Kaufmat]

---

Gaia Clary wrote:

hi;

In your first post in this thread you mentioned:

The big bet was now allowing anybody who used a software that was not Maya to  bring in sl their riggged meshes.

This confuses me a bit, because haven't there be many tools around since a long time which where able to create SL compatible rigged mesh Collada exports ?

You also mention:

Now it's possible to rig by your software of choice and then use blender just to obtain the dae file compatible with SL as maya already did before.I'll startr my tests later ( I've just got the news of the blender plugin).

Why wasn't this possible before ? I must admit that i am very focused on the Blender universe and i did not keep track on how other software would work or not work for SL.

So is Blender a tool that makes it easier to get rigged mesh to SL than other tools do ? Is that the reason why the new FBX Importer is so exciting ? Is the good news that you now can import from more tools to Blender and from blender create the final export files for SL ?

---

I'll tell you before this Blender, maya and max were the used software to make mesh.

Maya thanks to Chaty has got its tool to make fittted/liquid mesh

Blender has avastar,

3ds max even if its exporter is compatible with SL lacks a tool but oh well ( they can fix manually the dae before exporting).

 

The big iussue is for softwares like Modo, cheeta, cinema4d,rhino..and so on, where the exporter woud not allow SL to  read properly your dae.

Take for istance cinema4d..light years easier than blender workflow to use but its exporter least up to R15 sucks and would not allow them to import it in SL.. if you read about blog fashions you would see that a famous brand of SL does this thing.. she uses cinema to build and blender to rig, regretting in her blog to not be able to do all in c4d.

The idea is just as simple use those obj files taken  editing the sliders for SL collision bones ( the same mentioned in the list) as model to modify the collisopn deform bones in your 3d program this to build shape keys to use then in a graph editor with Drivers

to build for any software the SL sliders to use while rigging, get the mesh riged in the software that anybody likes rather than blende rather than maya or max.

 

I've already made athing that should work this way in blender gonna complete the stuff and try to give it buttons for the UI so it's easier tool to use, then make a tutorial that can be followed by anyne to make a similar thing for their fave software using blender like Rosetta Stone to share the workflow and the knowledge( of course it all opensource and free) :=]

 

Personally I wouldn't get maya 2015 nor max hence there are other nicer suites like modo and others cheaper and with a nice workflow, cause speeding up the job is important too.

If you scroll down the blender fora , maybe you've already done you could see how many of them are also cinema 4d users, not for nothing many parts of the new blender 2.6 interface were "copied by cinema 4d architecture" because they liked the better workflow, but it stil lacks many many things to call it easier.. let's call it cheap and working.

[Astrid Kaufmat]

Addedum

I was forgetting to say that all this madness is just for fitted aka liquid mesh

For standard size rigging, and for other grids where deformers sliders would still work it's just enough to use the blender "importer-exporter EXPERIMENTAL fbx format" plugin as it is to get your work good in world

Bypassing in this way the uncompatibility of some dae files from some softwares with SL.

 

It does the same hack that I did using maya as exporter of ciinema rigged mesh as shown in the old post (see the link above).