FBX Importer

Ajia · February 10, 2016, 7:58pm

If any of you have been following the forums since launch, you may have noticed a lot of requests and questions around FBX importing. We are happy to let you know that FBX Importer is coming soon. It is always our intention to focus on the most important challenges that you and other developers are facing. Please keep the suggestions coming, and stay tuned for more details about the FBX Importer.

Update 02/17/2016 (from blog post ): “We are soon releasing a new FBX importer, built entirely from scratch, to make it easier for artists to bring content into Lumberyard (including customers who are fans of tools like Blender). Our next release will support single meshes and materials, and we’ll follow up with support for multi-mesh, skins, skeletons, and animations. Additionally, since we know that many game teams rely on their own proprietary formats, we’ve also built an abstraction layer alongside the
FBX importer that enables you to extend the input format to suit your own team’s needs.”

LcSweeper · February 10, 2016, 8:31pm

That is good to hear and I am sure a lot of people will be very happy. On to documentation!!

Thanks

ShadowK · February 10, 2016, 8:04pm

Thanks, will there be a .DAE importer too? The .FBX SDK isn’t simple to work with and cross compatability between other programs can be problematic some times.

sewlek · February 10, 2016, 8:07pm

awesome to hear, was my only issue so far (but granted, didn’t do much yet)

Ajia · February 11, 2016, 11:50am

Hi @ShadowK,

It’s not something we’re working on now but good to know it’s of interest. We’ll add it to the list.

adamnerva · February 11, 2016, 5:57pm

Awesome news! This will make Modo and blender artists happy.

SonKim · February 11, 2016, 6:54pm

I’ve always wanted to use CryEngine, being a Modo user that wasn’t possible. I look forward to seeing this FBX pipeline in Lumberyard! Just FYI: Modo 903(coming soon) will support FBX 2014.

mrgigglesworth · February 11, 2016, 4:56pm

This is awesome news! You guys should definitely pin this post!

system · February 11, 2016, 5:30pm

Agreed! Done

ShadowGames · February 11, 2016, 9:04pm

Totally happy!

rrf1 · February 17, 2016, 10:14am

any and all importers that can be used without big expensive software would be Great! Thank You

abara · February 17, 2016, 10:32am

Great! generally well abandon plugins between exports to the engine, and the same with textures without plug-ins for Photoshop, but directly

Yeti · February 18, 2016, 1:24pm

Hate to be the one that asks but is there any kind of release date for the FBX importer ?

bioticfoundry · March 1, 2016, 1:24pm

Will the fbx importer support morph targets created in Blender?

Skygold · February 28, 2016, 4:49pm

It is great to see that the devs are listening. Already this and the forum reorganization are wonderful examples of your teams desire to support the community. Keep it up.

digitallysane · February 28, 2016, 11:58am

Great to hear! Without and FBX pipeline it’s impossible for a lot of teams to look into the software (we use Houdini for example).

It would be nice if the character pipeline would allow for separate import of blendshapes and their channels (after the import of the main model).

mrgigglesworth · March 11, 2016, 9:39am

Hi @Ajia,

The FBX importer is a great idea compared to the current offering, although after speaking with fellow game devs it might not be the best choice for LY in the long term. Since it’s a closed format it limits what contributions can be made to it. The Blender team has spoken of removing it in one of the next releases. Maybe a better choice would be embracing an open exchange format that was specifically developed for game development, something like Xbuf, OpenGEX or glTF. If LY were to embrace one of these formats it would be better for developers in the long term working with non-Autodesk software and one less chokehold that Autodesk has on the industry. OpenGEX and glTF formats have support within the DCC community and from what I can tell xbuf is similar in design to what LY team is looking for input format extensions.

http://www.xbuf.org/

http://opengex.org/

https://www.khronos.org/gltf

system · March 10, 2016, 3:27pm

Stay tuned!

AmazonGarden · March 10, 2016, 1:45pm

Any news about FBX animations import ?

SonKim · March 12, 2016, 1:56am

@mrgigglesworth

I
totally disagree. FBX is thee best choice for LY in the short or long term. So what if it’s a closed format? Everyone modern DCC app has FBX import/export(Modo ,Valve’s Hammer 2014 editor,even Zbrush support FBX). The dev game world does not revolve around Blender, it does revolve around FBX(like it or not). Epic Games gave 10,000 USD to the Blender Foundation to implement a
working FBX exporter for UE4, maybe they shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds them?