Exporting Animation as FBX Dissapearing Base Mesh HELP!

stitchshift

Hey Guys,

I am trying to export some of my animations to showcase on Sketchfab but for the life of me my character will not import/export as a FBX. When it does it only loads the arms, eyes, tongue and eyebrows of the character missing the main body entirely.



It loads the above instead of oh I dunno...



When I export it I get these error screens...



When I import it and its basically missing the main body I get this error...



I been beating my head against the wall for hours now when I upload it to sketchfab it loads the animation some of the time but without the body it looks ridiculous.

If anyone has experienced this please let me know. The guide for Maya on sketchfabs website assumes it will work first try if you follow there guides... Unless my rig doesn't work with .FBX.

Thanks again!

monster

Select all the meshes and Delete Non-Deformer History.
Also, enable Bake Animation from the FBX export dialog.

To avoid the Bind Pose errors, when applying Bind Skin:

• the root joint should not be a child of any other node
• set the options Use Selected Joints (with your joints selected)
• uncheck Remove Unused Influences
• and Max Influences to 4

stitchshift

Hey Monster,

Did all of that already... same result. Non deformer histories are gone and Baking the animation on Export produces the results above...
Thanks for the notes on the bind pose... the max influence on this model is 5 and I did "Use Selected Joints". Didn't notice the removed Unused influences though... I'll keep that in mind for my next model.



The Sketchfab export guides I read online said I need to select my character geometry and then "the top joint" which I assumed was the joint of my skeleton. As you can see from the outliner above... Am i doing this right? Maybe its something in the export settings? I use "Export Selection" said something about "Export All" causing issues....



Above is everything I have turned on at present...
Thanks again for the feedback!

monster

Because of how your rig is organized you need to bake the animation of the joints, unparent pelvis_jnt, and unparent all the character's geometry. Make sure the animation still works, select the joints and the geo, and then export selected.

Exporting to sketchfab is similar to exporting to a game engine. There should be no control objects and no "grp" nodes. Just a plain joint hierarchy, and geometry.

stitchshift

Ahhh okay cheers monster ill do that shortly!

stitchshift

Your method worked I can get the model out now but as far as deformers go I cant get out the clusters that contain my characters eyebrows  or wrap deformers I'm assuming this is not possible....

stitchshift

This is the stuff that's left in my outliner...



ive deleted everything else although I'm curious why when I choose export selected it doesn't just export the selected objects... It still exports everything in the scene...that's why I had to delete stuff prior to exporting to make sure it doesn't export all...

Anyway if i delete the eye look group the eyes freeze in place same with the phoneme_ctrl ... i control my brow with clusters and a wrap deformer again I'm sure sketchfab doesn't like that... I thought the blendshapes would export but they don't...

monster

stitchshift said:

ive deleted everything else although I'm curious why when I choose export selected it doesn't just export the selected objects... It still exports everything in the scene...that's why I had to delete stuff prior to exporting to make sure it doesn't export all...

Export Selection also picks up objects that have influence on your selected objects. In this case, Hitch_Char_Do_Not_Touch is more probably included in the bind pose data of the geometry. So it and all it's children are "selected" as well. To avoid this the root joint should not be a child of any objects when applying the bind pose. In game dev it's ideal for it to stay that way. Less nodes for the CPU and GPU to transform.

Anyway if i delete the eye look group the eyes freeze in place same with the phoneme_ctrl ... i control my brow with clusters and a wrap deformer again I'm sure sketchfab doesn't like that... I thought the blendshapes would export but they don't...

Blendshapes should work, but not any other type of deformer.

stitchshift

Ahh okay cheers Monster didn't realise the constraints and parents locked this stuff together even in the export selected sense. A nice to know!

Blendshapes sadly do not I export him and the face remains normal - no expression. I may have to call this off for now - no use exporting an animated mesh that doesn't animate properly...  didn't think there was anything I could do about the deformers although I did read about a bake deformer option but its only in Maya 2017 and I'm on 2016. Not that I'm sure that would make a difference anyway.

Thanks for the help monster!