Hello, good group,
i’m trying to export a 2d rig from unity,
Whenever I do this, the fbx exporter replaces the desired polygons and bones with reference points or nulls.
I tried different versions of unity, aswell as different export settings within the fbx exporter to no avail.
So now I’m wondering, unity’s 2D rigging/skeleton system uses terms like “polygon” and “geometry”, but is it really polygons i’m working with in there?
In case someone’s wondering:
i’m new to unity, and not using it for games,
i’m merely interested in some of it’s fast 2d rigging features,
eventually, all rigs should end up in another 3D package.
I wish I could offer you more guidance but I haven’t used the 2D rig stuff either.
I know with 3D rigs generally the armature (collection of bones) is represented internally as a parented hierarchy of GameObjects… but I have no idea what the exporter supports.
A Sprite in Unity is a mesh (with vertices and indices) connected to a specific texture. The 2D Animation package uses its Skinning Editor to allow developers to generate and edit geometry, add/edit bones and skin vertices to bones. Once edited in the Skinning Editor, the data is pushed back into the Sprite and stored for runtime consumption.
So if you wanted to export the mesh data from the Sprites, it should be possible. However, we haven’t heard this request before, so we haven’t looked at the FBX Exporter to see how well it hooks up with the 2D feature set.
If you have some coding knowledge, you could have a look at how the FBX Exporter fails, since the C# code should be available inside the package. If not, we can also take a look once time permits.
Out of curiosity, what would you like to use these tools for?
Hi Ted,
replying from my personal account cause i don’t have access to our office during the weekend.
First off, thank you for taking the time explaining what’s happening there in the 2D package.
Now i know it should work if i keep on trying.
Alas i do not have have any coding knowledge,
that stuff is way beyond the possibilities of the old noodle.
As for further troubleshooting, chances are i could resolve the problem getting to know Unity a little bit better,
we’re still taking baby steps here.
The reason why i choose Unity to try this, may seem awkward since it defeats the purpose of what the software originally was designed for.
In comparison to Unity’s massive scope of possibilities, there’s just this tiny fragment i’m interested in.
The way that package can import an ‘assembled’ character in .PSB format,
and generate automatic boundary meshes & weighting for each layer segment,
is like poetry to me.
After that, further rigging constraints and animation will be applied in our preferred 3D package (C4D)
A few alternatives to Unity are available to perform this specific task (Spine, Blender’s Leafig/COA add-ons,…etc)
For this purpose, none of them seem to work as fast & elegant as Unity does.
I work as an 2D/3D animator for a small startup company specialised in creating content for projection mapping.
For now, we do not make use of game engines, but i like to keep Unity close for future possibilities.
I had a closer look at the FBX Exporter, and it is currently only exporting from the following components
(Link)
So unfortunately, Sprite Renderers are not part of the supported components.
I will share your wish internally to the FBX Exporter team, so that they know users would like to export Sprites as well.
Thanks for your kind words regarding the PSD Importer & 2D Animation package. It is always fun to hear that our packages can enable people to create more easily!
For your specific use-case, I do not believe we have any Unity-developed tools to enable this pipeline of yours right now. The asset store might have some solutions to save down the Sprite mesh data into an fbx/obj file. Or you could find a programmer to write you a custom exporter. Since the data is there, and we have APIs to fetch it all, it shouldn’t be a tremendous task to create a tool like that.
Although I might be the 2nd person to ask about this - I’m wondering if anything ever came from the initial inquiry?
I’d love to take my rigged and animated sprite character (the bad guy) and export him to Blender and use motion tracking on some playtesters running and plop my character in so it looks like they are running away from the monseert. It’d make a great promo piece for my game!
It was added to the FBX Exporter teams backlog of things to consider in future releases.
I will add your feedback as well to the list, thanks for chiming in!
