Blender Woes

Unity Engine
1

Okay so when working with blender and Unity3d it feels like you always take two steps forwards and 1.99999 steps backwards. Let me explain.

Blender 2.45 has a wonderful fbx exporter that works with Unity3d splendidly; however, it is near impossible to find version 2.45 for download. If you go to the blender homepage and scoure the site you will find a download page, but when you click download version 2.45 it actually takes you to a page to download version 2.49.

Also you will lose features going from 2.49 back down to 2.45.

So why not just stick with version 2.49 you ask? Well because it doesn’t have an fbx converter, well kind of. There is the script for the converter hidden under page and page of other scripts, that you can actually open up and then there is a lot of garbage html in the script you must delete before it works. But then it only kind of works. It will properlly convert blend files into fbx files in Unity, but only in Unity. It won’t allow you to actually convert a blend file into a fbx file in which you could send to others. So unless the people you are working with also have blender, and have also unhacked the fbx exporter html bug, then good luck with collaboration.

Why don’t you just simply download the version 2.45 exporter script you ask? Well go over to google and type in blender fbx exporter script and click on every link that says download. You will be amazed at how many broken links there are. It almost feels like the version 2.45 exporter script never exisited. Someone has so thoroughly purged all download locations that it is harder to find then trying to find an original atari system at a garage sale in Russia.

Now can you still find version 32.45, yes. But that means a lot of looking, uninstalling (if you have 2.49 installed) reinstalling, and more!!!

So why do I type all of this? To complain, to gripe, to complain some more? No, it is to give anyone like me a comprehensive list of what will go wrong before it goes right. Blender works with Unity3d, but unless you have v2.45 you will have a lot of headache and heartache.

So here is the fix for all of your problems, if ever you try to use blender with Unity3d and it doesn’t work.

1st: If you have anything other than version. 2.45 erase it (Save your files) and go here Index of /release/
Download version 2.45 and you will then have the legitimate fbx converter.

2nd: When making animations any un-assigned vertex (Meaning every vertex must be assigned to an armature) will be mapped to an undefined location, giving your model a strange look and behavior.

3rd: Animations must be armature actions. End of story, good night. Can’t use transformations, must be actions.

This has been seriously several hours of research so I hope it helps. With that said, Unity3d, it would be extremely helpful to newbies if you explained some of this in your help sections.

Thanks all!

2

I had a similar problem with 2.49 and FBX export, though Unity wouldn’t even convert the Blend to FBX. I suspect the only reason it works on your system is that it’s calling an older version of Blender to do the conversion.

There was a bug with export in the initial release. The latest release of 2.49 (2.49b) fixes this problem.

I suggest completely uninstalling Blender 2.49, and any other version of Blender you have installed. Use the uninstaller. Insure that there is no .b.blend file in your applications directory.

Typically this is found in C:\Documents and Settings*username*\Application Data\Blender Foundation\Blender.blender\

After reinstalling .FBX export should work again. Make sure you have the absolute latest version of Blender 2.49!

One other note - You can animate transforms. You have to use the NLA editor instead of the Action editor. This is made somewhat redundant with the new Animation editor in Unity 2.6, but to each their own.
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