Urgent! Trouble with Exporting Blend Shapes to FBX

[Anonymous]

Dear Autodesk community,

We're a group of students working on a game project (realized within Unity3D Engine) and we encounter a serious problem.

We can't bake our animations with Blend Shapes into FBX Files.

The animation does neither work in Unity3D nor when reimporting the FBX into Maya. 

We used "Edit -> Keys -> Bake Simulation"

Unless we manage to fix it this issue might be game-breaking

We're looking forward to your responses,

Best regards

Team Valhalla 

[saihtam]

Hey, you don't export the blendshapes like that. You have to export the blendshapes as separate objects, then import into Unity where you will create a setup the will trigger the blendshapes. The bake simulation only works on keyframes, so the translation, rotation and scale values. Try to follow this guide to get your blendshapes up and running.

Here is a Youtube video going through the process.

Hope this helps.

[Anonymous]

The Problem is, we are not trying to import the blend shapes themselves to Unity. We are trying to import an animaton which is using a Blendshape.

[saihtam]

Sorry if I was a bit unclear, but to my understanding that is not how you setup blendshapes. I like the idea of the setup this guy(post 8) has done, basically to drive the blendshapes in unity in run time via an extra or more bones. If you get that working, then all you have to do is hook up the weight value of the blendshapes in Maya to those joints and bake it out. Then you only need to export out a skeleton for your animation and you can keep all the parts nice and separated.

Just below is also some instructions on how to setup this with what I think you are currently trying to do. Have a look and see what makes sense.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/using-blend-shapes-in-4-3.210412/

[Anonymous]

Apologies for necro on the thread. But i'm searching for info about the fbx exporter and figured I'd chime in on this in case someone else runs into Adsboa's problem.

The reply was only partially accurate. You are able to export blendshapes with your character. You are also able to import blendshapes directly. Which you choose is up to you. My best guess as to why it wasn't baking is that you have to select the blendshape node itself when baking simulation in order to bake those keys. Otherwise the channel will simply be left blank once you export the FBX.

I have shipped a mobile game using Unity where I was rigger/animator, so I am absolutely certain this will work and work in the final compiled game, as well. Although the specifics of the process on the side of Unity may change as it goes through upgrades.

[a_denisenko8VRS2]

I thought FBX exporter in Maya shoud bake all the animated values on the Blendhsape node if you check "Blendshapes" option in the exporter settings. But for some reason it does not bake blendshape animations. It is getting really frustrated when it comes to exporting blendshapes animations from Maya. You should hand by hand select all the blendshapes nodes and bake simulations (keys) on them, for every each node (and if there are dozens of blendshapes node on your character this process is very time consuming). FBX exporter should do this, that's for sure. could it be fixed somewhen in the future?