Appearance Materials not exporting properly when using FBX (cloud) export?

[mark.warner]

Hi folks, I’ve googled and searched the forums and I’m coming up empty on this one. My workflow is probably unusual so I expect this might be a pretty niche issue. 

As part of my workflow, I’m exporting my finished Fusion 360 objects in an FBX format. Most comprise several components, bodies, etc. Then I’m opening them up in Maya LT to straighten up and properly map the UVs before texturing in another editor (Substance Painter in this case, but this is tangential).

The issue I’m having is that any faces (polygons, or vertices, or UVs by this point, i’m unsure of the proper terminology) will have the default material (in Maya, a rather garish neon green) assigned instead of a material ID representing the materials that was assigned to them in Fusion UNLESS I had specifically assigned an appearance material to that face by setting “assign to” in the Appearance dialog to “Faces” and dragging the material onto that Face (or selected group of Faces) specifically. Any face which has a material applied by applying it to the entire body simultaneously doesn’t seem to be associated with that material in the FBX and instead is set to the default material.

Obviously it would be way too labor intensive to assign an appearance material to each and every face on my Fusion object every time. I’m hoping I’m missing something that can be fixed. The FBX export doesn’t seem to have any options that can be set, you just run it and get the output. I can’t switch to OBJ because I need the joints and such to be included. 

Expected behavior: I’d expect to see the proper material ID on all faces (polys, vertices, whatever) in Maya with the albedo set to the primary color of the material from Fusion, which happens with all faces that have been specifically assigned as outlined above) even for faces which were assigned in bulk as parts of bodies. 

Anybody ever run into this or know a fix?  This is causing me to generate far more texture maps than I need and is preventing me from optimizing them for other editors and renderers. It’s also creating a lot of manual work as I adjust every single UV set in Maya to account for overlapping due to so many faces being set to the default material.

Thanks in advance!

[jodom4]

Hey mark.warner,

Fusion doesn't support UV mapped texture exports when applied to bodies at this time. The most efficient way to add textures to exported models is probably to just do all your texture mapping in Maya. Sorry for the inconvenience. 

[mark.warner]

Hi jodom4,

Thanks for your reply.

I’m not looking for UV wrapped texture mapping from Fusion 360, through.
I’m looking for the Material IDs to be consistently applied when exporting
an FBX file. Fusion DOES support material IDs and some of them are present
in the export.

The issue is that the export is missing a bunch of materials on faces
depending upon how they were applied in Fusion. This is pretty clearly a
bug unless I’m missing a step.

[mark.warner]

OK so I've re-read your reply, and you're telling me that exporting materials assigned to faces as whole bodies is "not supported" rather than recognizing that it's a bug for an FBX export to have materials applied to some faces but not others regardless of how the object appears in the UI?

That's... did you type that with a straight face? Come on man. 🙂

"Not supported" would make sense if NO materials were being exported, but selectively exporting some materials while not exporting others is clearly broken. That's worse than just not attaching them at all.

You need a cloud based converter for this? This is silly. At least let's have a checkbox to turn off materials so we're not stuck with this broken behavior. Makes no sense.