FBX Export to include Visibility
Right now, if I export animation as an FBX in Blender, it won't allow my animation to include keys to have Visibility on/off.
But... if I export it from Maya, it does.
I want the Visibility to be included as part of Blender's FBX Export functionality purely because I'm an animator and I need it.
But I also want it because anytime Maya does something better than Blender it annoys me.
Yes, I need Visibility for my animation, but I also need the satisfaction that Blender is in all respects superior to Maya, and if there's even one thing that Maya can say it's better at than Blender then I feel something is fundamentally wrong with the Universe.
In the Unity documentation it says: "Blender does not export the visibility value inside animations in the FBX file."
docs.unity3d.com/2018.3/Documentation/Manual/HOWTO-ImportObjectsFrom3DApps.html
And yet, Unity is a patron member of the Blender Foundation.
blender.org/press/unity-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-a-patron-member/
Please, can someone strongly urge the people who represent that partnership to focus their development on including Visibility in Blender's FBX Exporter.
Please upvote this so it comes to someone's attention who can actually do something about this, if only to set the Universe right once again.
4 Comments
The problem with this is that you then have to add visibility keys in Unity, which means then that every time you tweak or update your animation in Blender, you have to redo the visibility keys from scratch in Unity. It's little things like this that stop Blender being used more widely in the game industry.
@purgebs - I hear you.
I did some more digging. It seems as though the FBX file format is owned by Autodesk and therefore it's proprietary software- meaning that we don't have access to it, therefore Blender can't support code for it.
Autodesk are c0ck bl0cking us, basically.
This is sad, because we only need to be able to key ONE custom property and then we get scripts in Unity to convert them to visibility or whatever else we need. But without even that one custom property we're stuck doing the double work, like you said.
Arrgh, that sucks! Well, I'm sorry for implying the fault was with Blender. I wonder if there is any scope for making a proprietary Blender format that will interoperate more closely with Unity and other game engines? It's kind of pathetic that Autodesk feel the need to do that, and it's partly that kind of corporate behaviour that prompted me to ditch 3DS Max for Blender in the first place.
I'm with you on this. I'd like to see some kind of open-source workaround myself. Open-source is the way of the future.