Ambiera ForumDiscussions, Help and Support. |
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This engine is profoundly terrible at importing animated meshes, for whatever reason. I'm okay with the lack of normal maps, but man is it a pain getting anything to work. Any guidance would be appreciated, but here's what I've tried. Model Origin: - I'm using Mixamo animated FBX files for my game characters. What I've tried: 1. Merging animations in Blender 3.6, exporting to FBX, importing to CopperCube. Result: Animations get hard-coded to 300fps (despite being exported at 30fps), models are scaled 20x larger regardless of unit or scaling settings within blender, animation bounds CANNOT be defined at all. For example, Idle animation will sometimes include walk cycle keyframes, other times it won't, regardless of which frame I define as the beginning / end of animations. Dynamic lighting is broken from needing to scale model 20x smaller in CopperCube. 2. Merging the animations in Blender 3.6, exporting to FBX, using AutoDesk FBX Converter to port back to FBX 2010, importing into CopperCube. Result: The same issues as workflow 1, but with much larger file sizes for some reason. 3. Merging the animations in Blender 3.6, exporting to FBX, using AutoDesk FBX Converter to port back to FBX 2010, Importing to FragMotion 1.2.6 (the only version that supports FBX, apparently), exporting to .X (DirectX) files, importing to Coppercube. Result: The model isn't 20x larger!!! But now 20x smaller than it should be. Scaling breaks dynamic model lighting just like in workflows 1 and 2. Animations have the correct framerate and can be separated / defined properly!!! However, PNG alpha channels for textures totally destroy rendering. Transparent edges clip through the entire model. Defining textures as "grass" doesn't fix it like it does on FBX models. 4. Merging the animations in Blender 3.6, exporting to FBX, importing FBX into Blender 2.78, enable DirectX export addon, manually define DirectX parameters, export to .X file Result: It's a 50/50 chance if animations import at all. But, the model is only 2x smaller now!! Otherwise, the exact same results as 3. 5. Export a Mixamo t-pose FBX file, convert this and all existing animation files into FBX 2010 format with AutoDesk FBX Converter, import t-pose FBX file into FragMotion, then merge other animation files underneath the t-pose layer, export to CopperCube in both .X and .FBX Result: FBX files have the same issues as workflows 1 and 2, but now when the character's legs touch the floor during the animation, all keyframes glitch out. .X files don't seem to work with this method at all, as only part of my character's body would import to CopperCube with no animation. 6. Merge all animations in Blender 3.6, export animation skeleton only as a motion-capture .BVH file, export t-pose mesh separately as FBX, then convert to FBX 2010. Import t-pose to FragMotion, then apply BVH animation skeleton. Result: FragMotion couldn't figure out how to apply a BVH animation to the FBX model's rig. 7. Merge all animations in Blender 4.4, use Source Engine extension to render animation sequence to .SMD format, import to FragMotion, export as .X or .FBX. Result: FragMotion returns error "file contains too many verticies" SOLUTION: 8. Merge all animations with this website (https://nilooy.github.io/character-animation-combiner/). Export to GLB or GLTF format. Import file to Blender 4.4, export as FBX, import into CopperCube. Result: The model is now even more oversized, and the rig is broken. CopperCube still hard-codes the animations at 300fps. However, with this approach CopperCube seems to cleanly multiply animation frames by almost 100x. For instance, my idle animation is 499 frames, though for some reason the github website compresses this to 399 frames, but CopperCube sees it as 4,999 frames. Animations can actually be segmented into layers when multiplying the original frame length by 10x. CopperCube also seems to automatically recognize animation layers and does this mostly-automatically. EDIT: This breaks textures :( |
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[Continued from above] I'm awaiting the very mediocre customer service of Ultimate Unwrap 3D Pro to e-mail me the license I purchased earlier today. I'll update here if that software fixes anything, as it seems to be the software of choice for CopperCube devs. Nonetheless, I think CopperCube seriously needs to focus on it's model import toolset ASAP. To me, this matters more than basically any other bugfix. Especially as, even now with a "working" model (albeit running at 300fps for some reason, hope that doesn't cause performance issues), dynamic lighting is totally broken because I'm having to scale it back down to size and cannot "freeze scale" as I do for static models. Attached here is a download of my portable installation of FragMotion 1.2.6 for anyone who needs it, though at least in my workflow it didn't help. It was difficult finding this version for FBX support though, so maybe this could help someone. https://drive.google.com/file/d/... EDIT: I received my product key for Ultimate Unwrap 3D Pro, and it pains me to say that this $60 program I won't use 90% of completely fixed my problems. Here's a workflow that's working for me, albeit with some minor lighting issues within CopperCube: 9: Merge FBX animations in Blender 4.4, export as FBX, import FBX into Ultimate Unwrap 3D Pro, Click 3D Tools\Modifiers\Scene\ScaleTo, then Scale the scene to "34.000" exactly, for this counteracts CopperCube scaling issues (NOTHING I do in Blender or even to the FBX itself will have any effect on scaling at all), export to Blitz3D Format (via UU3D extension), import to CopperCube, re-define animation FPS as 30FPS instead of 300, manually segment animations by frame number. It seems that while CopperCube's .X importer is completely broken on every model I've tried, Blitz3D imports work FAR better than FBX ever did. Even some of my texture mipmap issues have been solved by this format. |
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Hey haydenstrauss, I'm glad you dedicated time to experiment and show us how you got it working, but for blender I think there is a way to fix scaling, after scaling your armature to your preferred size, during export as fbx check the apply transform box, i think it works  but sadly it doesn't fix the animation frames number, I'm glad you found a way to fix it, it's going to help a lot when detecting frame number to perform an action but please tell me, in coppercube where the animation looking well at 30fps at the final result?
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@Monks Unfortunately, even the "transform" box in Blender's FBX exporter does not seem to affect the model scale in CopperCube regardless of Blender version (I've tried 4.4, 3.6, 2.8, and 2.66). Neither does resizing the model in Blender manually. Yes, my animation looks nearly-perfect at 30fps now that I'm converting to Blitz3D. One major caveat is that animation blending seems to break it, so I have it set to "1" and that's worked well for me. Additionally, CopperCube seems to spin my character backwards, meaning facing away from the camera while walking towards it, but only when animations are called via javascript. My solution to this was rotating the model 180 degrees in Ultimate Unwrap and then re-exporting as Blitz3D. |
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Oh that's good to know I love the solution but my problem is the combining of keyframes before exporting and manually separating them, it's a pain in the neck 
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