FBX

This format is mainly use for interchanging character animations between applications and is supported by applications such as Cinema4D, Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, Wings3D and engines such as Unity3D, Unreal Engine 3/UDK and Unreal Engine 4.

The exporter can bake mesh modifiers and animation into the FBX so the final result looks the same as in Blender.

Note

Bones would need to get a correction to their orientation (FBX bones seems to be -X aligned, Blender’s are Y aligned), this does not affect skinning or animation, but imported bones in other applications will look wrong.

Animations (FBX AnimStacks, Blender actions) are not linked to their object, because there is no real way to know which stack to use as ‘active’ action for a given object, mesh or bone. This may be enhanced to be smarter in the future, but it’s not really considered urgent, so for now you’ll have to link actions to objects manually.

Armature instances are not supported.

Note

Bones’ orientation importing is complex, you may have to play a bit with related settings until you get the expected results.

Animation support is minimal currently, we read all curves as if they were ‘baked’ ones (i.e. a set of close keyframes with linear interpolation).

Imported actions are linked to their related object, bone or shape key, on a ‘first one wins’ basis. If you export a set of them for a single object, you’ll have to reassign them yourself.

Note

Saving Just Animations

The FBX file format supports files that only contain takes. It is up to you to keep track of which animation belongs to which model. The animation that will be exported is the currently selected action within the Action editor. To reduce the file size, turn off the exporting of any parts you do not want and disable All Actions. For armature animations typically you just leave the armature enabled which is necessary for that type of animation. Reducing what is output makes the export and future import much faster. Normally each action will have its own name but the current or only take can be forced to be named “Default Take”. Typically, this option can remain off.

Note

Blender now only supports complex node-based shading. FBX having a fixed pipeline-like support of materials, this add-on uses the generic wrapper featured by Blender to convert between both.