I have a simple low poly bow mesh with two animations(BowDraw and FireBow). If I just export the mesh without choosing the armature option in the blender mesh exporter, my mesh turns out normal in FBX Review.
I try exporting the mesh with the armature option checked and I get some crazy results. It does show my two animation in the top right of FBX Review, but parts of the mesh are missing surfaces and one piece of the mesh is just floating in space. The weights for the mesh animation are not right either. I show all this in the images below.
I have tried a bunch of exporter options and I have removed all ngons from my model. So I am attaching the .blend file in the hopes that someone more experienced with Blender and Unity can figure out where I went wrong post the corrected file. The file should be available from the link below or in the attachments to this post. bow model.zip
Please let me know if you have difficulty viewing the images or .blend file. I am looking forward to seeing in anyone can fix this problem.
*I Never used any of those autodesk tools, I don’t use converter either.
So I think the problem here is autodesk review.
If it doesn’t work in Unity directly for you for some reason; there’s an update to the fbx exporter in the nightly builds if you want to test that out.(not in official release yet, should be in 2.72)
I originally installed Blender 2.71 from the installer exe. How do I set up Unity to use the Blender from the nightly build folder instead of the Blender installed on my machine?
Np!
To use nightly builds you have to use it manually> You extract the .zip file and run the blender.exe from within the folder itself. ( beware, double clicking .blend files will open with the blender you installed with installer)
Although, have you tried with your current version to import the .fbx directly in Unity and see if the weight problem happens?
I suggest trying this out before using nightly builds, they are not stable builds. On my end everything worked in Unity directly with 2.71 so the issue seems to be autodesk review not liking Blender’s custom .fbx
Only use nightly builds for testing or last resort.
I have tried importing my .blend file into my Unity project in two ways. First, I right click on my assets folder and click the “Import New Asset” option. Secondly, I have tried including my .blend file manually by copy and pasting it in the Assets folder of my project using the windows file browser. In both cases, I get a message pop-up which says that Blender has stopped working and a error in the Unity console stating,
“Blender could not convert the .blend file to FBX file.
You need to use Blender 2.45-2.49 or 2.58 and later versions for direct Blender import to work.”
Here is some information about my setup.
I am running Windows 7, 64 bit. I have the newest version of Blender(2.71) installed and I have the newest version of Unity(4.5.2f1) on my machine. I am also running Unity free, not Pro.
Thanks again for your help and please let me know if you have any ideas on how to fix this problem.
I forgot to answer your original question in my last reply.
I just tested to see how the .fbx file looks in Unity. The weights on the model look fine and there are no holes in the mesh like I was seeing in FBX Review. I did notice that a piece of the mesh is floating in mid-air. I checked in my Blender file and the mesh is floating there as well so that is definitely due to my inability to animate, which is fine because I am learning.
The only thing I don’t understand is my second animation called “FireBow”. It shows up fine in Blender, but when I view in Unity from the .fbx file, it looks really contorted. The bow looks like it is facing the wrong way and the top half of the bow is folded over on the bottom half.
So after lots of tinkering I think the problem lies with the first frame of animation.
I set frame 0 of the animation for my BowFire animation to the armature’s rest state. Just a tip, if you select the all the bones and hit alt + g and alt + r, Blender will remove all the rotations and transforms for the bones. This gives you the armature’s rest state.
Now the animations are no longer backwards or upside down in Unity.
This isn’t a perfect solution because now you have to insert the armature’s rest state at the beginning of all your animations, which makes seamlessly blending from one animation to another impossible.
If anyone figures out a another solution, please let me know.
Below is the zip of the modified .blend file and .fbx file. bowTest.zip
One more thing worth mentioning, make sure your armature is the rest position before exporting to .fbx or your will get some weird results.
Also I have noticed that I don’t have any animation problems when I use the FBX 6.1 ASCII format for the Blender exporter. So all my problems I have mentioned previously, relate exclusively to using the FBX 7.4 Binary version of the FBX exporter.
Also, could someone make sure that this post gets to one of the Blender Devs. I used their latest nightly build and this post may have details to help them debug the FBX exporter. I am not sure of the best way to contact them.
