Importing Assets to Blender (Armatures and Animations Included)

[saito100]

So, after a couple hours of trial and error I have managed to successfully import some of SOMA's assets over to Blender. The process itself is not the fastest and is quite tedious but it does yield great results if you are wanting to work with the assets in Blender.

In this thread I will only be going over how to import one of the enemies. If it is simply a mesh you are wanting to import, you can convert it to an *.obj through Maya and then import it to Blender.

So, firstly what you're going to do is determine the model in which you are wanting to work with. For this example I have decided to use the devil model located at "SOMA\entities\character\flesher\devil\devil.DAE". After you have found your model of choice you will now need to convert it through Autodesk's FBX converter. This will in turn take the model you have chosen and convert it to the 2013 FBX formatting (version 7.3). Blender will not accept version 7.5 FBX formatting, that is the one that Maya 2017 currently uses when you export for FBX.


Autodesk FBX Converter

As you can see above, that is the FBX converter and there is no need to alter any of the default settings. You simply point to the model that you want to convert and then click "convert". After it's done converting you will want to refer back to your model's folder and go into the "animations" folder. Since my model is the devil, and I have chosen to use the idle animation, the path for me is "SOMA\entities\character\flesher\devil\animations\idle.dae_anim". After you find the animation you want to use, make a copy of it and then paste it with your converted FBX model we obtained in the previous step. After you paste it you will want to remove the "_anim" following the ".dae" extension. Doing this step will allow you to import the animated armature to Blender.

Now, you will want to open Blender and of course delete everything in your scene. After you have an empty scene to work with you will now import (as FBX) your model that you converted in step one. After you have your model imported you will want to navigate yourself to the modifiers tab of the mesh and apply the armature modifier. After you have applied the modifier you can delete the armature from the mesh itself and it will still retain the pose it was left with from the original armature parented to it. You now want to import the animated armature that you renamed in step two as a DAE file. When you import the armature it will be hard to see it unless you go into wireframe view (key "z") and notice it under your mesh. We will firstly select the mesh, then select the armature underneath it and then press (Ctrl + P). A small window will appear and you will want to select "Armature Deform".



After you have done this, the armature is successfully parented to your model's mesh and will animate it accordingly so. I have noticed with different animations that this process will need to be altered to accommodate the alterations. Most of the animations do not begin at frame one (at least in Blender and Maya), so you will need to trim your timeline so it will play and work correctly.

If this thread seems too vague, or just too confusing to follow, please leave a reply and state where your confusion was and I may make a short video on this if it is wanted. I may periodically edit and add information while I continue to learn on working with the assets. I hope this was helpful!



That gif was much larger than expected.

[Mudbill]

You can manually set the size of an image in an [img] tag by doing [img=100x100] (for 100x100 pixels)

Otherwise, nice guide! I like it when people put effort into these. It shows.