Exporting FBX with animation:

Hellgnome

I am back to school, and we have gotten an assignment that is due this comming tuesday, and no one in the class who uses Maya can solve this, only the Blender user have solved it ( Like wtf ;P )
BTW, I have nothing against Blender, it is an amazing program, I just find it funny, that blender can do this so easy, but a Mammoth like Maya can´t ???.
(Or maya can, but 17 people are just to dumb, to figure it out -.-´!)
BTW! The tutors are not helping, we are suposed to solve it oureselves, or find help outside, to solve it.

So here goes.
No matter what i do in maya, it is only on the bones/armature that the animation stays on, when we export it as fbx.
The geometry itself, is not deforming?
I have even tried to "pre-bake" in the : Key -> Bake Simulation in Maya.

And I can even delete the skeleton, delete the history and still have it animate in maya. But as soon as I export as FBX, nope.... Nothing (Expet for the animation on the armature, that styes).

I tried to import the fbx to unity, and in the Unity animation window, nothing is happening to the cylinder. (Again, when the Blender dude in class did it, it works fine!!!)

So why not just use Blender too? Because I use maya at my internship/work.

I have attached the maya scene as a zip file, and here are some images of my Maya FBX export settings:

Hope some of you experts can help, and tell me how stupid I was for not ticking the right boks, or something ecually easy ;P

Alex_J

If the mesh is bound to the skeleton and this is working in maya
and the export settings show that you are including the skins

then the next place to check is app you are importing too
double check the import settings there

most likely it's just a human error somewhere, like you exported to the wrong place and keep reimporting an unchanged fbx or something like that. Just setup a temporary directory and carefully go through the steps one at a time to identify where the problem is.
Most problems are usually of this nature, especially when you are learning.

also double check the binding parameters as well. could have done a type of skin binding that might not be supported in unity or something. 

Hellgnome

Alex_J said:

If the mesh is bound to the skeleton and this is working in maya
and the export settings show that you are including the skins

then the next place to check is app you are importing too
double check the import settings there

most likely it's just a human error somewhere, like you exported to the wrong place and keep reimporting an unchanged fbx or something like that. Just setup a temporary directory and carefully go through the steps one at a time to identify where the problem is.
Most problems are usually of this nature, especially when you are learning.

also double check the binding parameters as well. could have done a type of skin binding that might not be supported in unity or something. 

I might have found the problem (I think), but that just gave me another problem.

It seams that the blendshapes are not being exported?
I have ticked the include blendshapes boks🤔 ?

Any suggestions, or knowledge you can draw on, that could explain why they are not being exported?

Eric Chadwick

Have you tried the Unity Integration Tool?
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.formats.fbx@5.1/manual/integration-maya-roundtrip.html

(from a quick Google search for "Maya FBX Unity animation")

Mark Dygert

1) Export with the game exporter (File > Game Exporter). You might have to enable the plug-in (Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager: "gamefbxExporter") if you don't see it in the file menu. Most of the time you don't even need to mess with the FBX settings, but click the gear if you do.
- Use the models tab to export the mesh and joints in the bind pose.
- Use the animation tab to manage and export animations.

2) Edit > Delete History > Non Deformer History. This will clear out the history cutter while preserving things like blendshapes and skinning. I bet you have some really messy history and all of that really screws with exports. You should get in the habit of looking at your channel box and making sure the history only shows the outputs that you actually need. Long strings of edits will absolutely cause all kinds of messed up issues. If you ever need to edit your mesh after it has been skinned, copy it, do your edits and copy the skin weights from the old mesh to the new.

3) Export as ASCII, this is technically "optional" but seriously, a lot of tech artists will chuck a mouse pad at your head if you submitted binary files to a project. Technically binary is smaller, but it's completely unreadable by humans which makes it useless if you need to edit the file in order to salvage it or bulk edit large libraries of files without opening them. The ASCII file can be opened in any text editor and read/edited by humans. Which has saved my ass a handful of times.