Good format for character mesh & animation export?

Question

I've been trying all sorts of different formats but I can't find a decent exporter for character animation from Blender 2.69 which exports mesh, UV wrapped texture info (doesn't have to include the texture), bone and animation information.

It seems that the FBX exporter may do animation, but I'm struggling to understand the format. I'd be happy to write my own exporter (in fact, I have half an exporter now) but I can't find any good references on how to export animation data. It seems the API has gone through some changes recently which might account for the lack of up-to-date information?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I've had marginal success with the DirectX exporter.

The DirectX format supports meshes, vertex normals, UV coordinates, simple materials, bones, bone animation, and multiple animations in the same file. I've been able to export game-ready models using this format and load them into other software with Assimp.

Unfortunately, the 'Coordinate System' and 'Up Axis' options give unexpected results, doing really strange things to the Matrix Transforms for each bone in an armature. In other words, your model may import sideways or mirrored.

Blender version 2.71 includes an updated FBX exporter (now exports to FBX v7.4 binary instead of v6.1). FBX also handles all of the above features, and is generally the format of choice when exporting animation to Unity. The drawback of FBX is that it is not yet supported by Assimp.