Having problems exporting animations from blender consistenly

[steeleb]

My major problem is trying to export an fbx animation/mesh from blender to a leadwerks mdl *consistently*. When I export a mesh there is a chance of one of the following three things happening. Either no animations will get exported, I will have very weird deformations happening in different frames, that do not in any way appear to look like the original animation, or the animation will export perfectly. The current process that I am using is with "rigify" skeleton, and then building the animation from posing that rig. When exporting the fbx, I normally only include the armature and mesh, turn off modifiers, don't use the default take, include all animations, and optimize key frames. Now while that is what I normally do, I also tweak the various knobs, to see if they change help explain the inconsistent behaviour. However, I don't really get any inconsistent animation behavior from that. My hypothesis is that the rigify skeleton, is perhaps overkill, and the fbx exporter has issues exporting a rigifiy skeleton, and that is why I get inconsistent results. That, or I may be applying scaling to the armature incorrectly, or something like that. However, it is all pure speculation.

 

I was wondering if there was any general advice on the do's and dont's with regards to exporting animations/meshes from blender, considering that I am a complete novice? And if anybody uses rigify, and knows all the quirks with regards to it? Finally, is it better to just make a simple rig, and use that for basic animation, instead of rigify?

[3Dski7059]

I can only say that I'm very interested in these kinds of issues as well. Understanding what will and will not work would save a lot of time, if there are some known circumstances that end with bad results. I was getting ready to test the waters with some simple animations... partly because I need more experience with creating some assets. Sorry I've no insighs to share : (

[steeleb]

I am determining that my problems exporting my animations to an fbx had to do with rigify. Just speculating, but I don't think blender's fbx exporter, handles rigify's bones. The rigify bones are not only numerous, but a have a lot of complexity as well. I have a feeling that it's just not reading the rig and key frames correctly.

 

I have since made a brand new rig, using a set-up similar to the tutorial found here

 

http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/blender/building-a-basic-low-poly-character-rig-in-blender/

 

And thus far have had no problems exporting the animation. Honestly, the rig I made, while much simpler, I think has better forward kinematic controls for the arms. It's simpler and easier to use, but all the bone naming is kind of a pain in the butt.