pixelminerXNA:

Maybe you have your cubes set to smooth instead of solid?

I would try exporting out the cube with "Set Smooth" then "Set Solid" and see if it gives you different results in the FBX.  Or try to figure out if there is anything that might be different between the plane and the cubes settings wise.

Hope that helps.

I already tried that to no avail. Even when I create a new default scene (the one with the cube) and I display the Vertex Normals using the "Draw VNormals" feature, the vertex normals are no good. But thinking of it, it seems logical. The vertex is connected to 3 faces. The faces normals are what I would expect, perpendicular to the face. The vertex normals are then averaged between those 3 normals. See the screenshot below:
Vertex Normals screenshot

That is exactly how the vertex normals should look.

Also note that if you line up a bunch of shiny objects and shine a light at them, they all get a their own similar specular highlight, they don't share one.

Daaark:

That is exactly how the vertex normals should look.

Also note that if you line up a bunch of shiny objects and shine a light at them, they all get a their own similar specular highlight, they don't share one.

Yeah, after thinking about it, I see that this would be expected behaviour, though it was not giving the results I was looking for.

I combine multiple cubes to create a larger wall. And for that situation, it didn't give me the results I wanted. See here. That's really not what a wall should look like. Note that I exagerated the specular highlights for the purpose of demonstration. I know that a stone wall will not really have any highlights.

Btw, I was able to get the result I was looking for by building the cube out of 6 planes instead of a cube primitive. Thus, for each visible vertex, there are actually 3 vertices with the same coordinates. However, each has a different normal (the same as the face's normal it belongs to).

Few days ago I said I'd start talking about animation in Blender.   But before we can talk animation we have to have something to animate with which means we have to talk rigging.  And lucky again for me there are resources on the web which explains a lot of the stuff. Here are a few choice morsels I found on youTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bglXLszGd3o <--Interesting simple modeling/rigging tutorial.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFWASXbUsCg <--The classic rig-a-tube tutorial for blender.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mFge8E20zU <--Simple arm rigging tutorial with nice production value.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSjBhlmKVhg&feature=related  <--Simple leg rigging tutorial.

And for the ultimate in Blender rigging education you have to check out:

http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info.php?products_id=99

I own the DVD and it's simply amazing.  Well worth the $50 US.

For rigging and animation you could also check out Introduction to Character Animation in the Blender Wiki Summer of Documentation. I learned the basics of Blender with this tutorials. It assumes no prior Blender knowledge and starts by showing to model a character, using materials, rigging the character and then animating it. It's like the Gus the Gingerbread Man tutorial series in the Blender Manual.

Then for more advanced rigging, there is Introduction to Rigging also in the Blender Wiki Summer of Documentation. I haven't looked at that one yet, but it looks pretty promising.

Miner, I extruded the bones circled in yellow from joint circled in red, but now when I move them, it turns out they free floating. I tried to merge them, but it changed nothing. How do I fix this, and how did this happen?

-edit-

I'm having this problem everywhere that I try to select an existing joint and extruding new ones from it.

Daaark:

Miner, I extruded the bones circled in yellow from joint circled in red, but now when I move them, it turns out they free floating. I tried to merge them, but it changed nothing. How do I fix this, and how did this happen?

Eventhough bones may seem like they may be sharing a single base, this is not the case.  Each bone has it's own "head" and a "tail".  So what you did by extruding a bone out of the tail of one bone, the red one in this case, is created a new bone who's tail position happens to be the same as the tail position of another bone.  So, if subsequently the tail of any bones are moved, the tails of the other bones will not follow.  And merging them won't work either because since each bone has it's own head and tail they will always remain independent.

So, what makes bones stay together isn't merging but by parent-child relationships only.(Select the bone to be the child, shift select the bone to be the parent, ctrl+p)  And since that is the case if you wanted the bone tails circled in the above image to stay together as they moved they would need to be the child of another bone where the head position of that bone corresponds to the tail position of the parent. (The head of the bone is where the "point" of the bone ends.)

In the case of the above skeleton what I would have done is to have a "root" bone whose tail, or the fat end, is located at 0,0,0.  Then I would extrude the spine and the appendages of the skeleton from the head, the pointy end, of the root bone so all your bones will be organized in a "center out" fashion where each bone has a parent and a child unless that bone happens to be either the root bone or one of the bones at extremities.

Hope that made sense...

Okay, the problem here is also that when I do a mirrored extrude, one side of the bone chain gets the proper functionality, and the other side doesn't. So I can pull on the right side bones and they pull at the rest of the skeleton, but if I pull at the left side bones, they come detached from the root. It's really hard to see what is going on.

Daaark:

Okay, the problem here is also that when I do a mirrored extrude, one side of the bone chain gets the proper functionality, and the other side doesn't.

Have you tried doing one side at a time?  You can use numeric input to make sure the heads and tails are mirrored across some axis.

Daaark, here's a neat trick that should help you out.

First, make sure the viewport is set to perspective, not orthographic/isometric (e.g. 5 on the number pad to toggle).

Set your viewport to how you want the camera to see your scene.

Hit Ctrl+Alt+0 and the default camera (highlight a camera and hit Ctrl+0 to make it the default if there's more than one) will match the viewport.

Is there a tutorial anywhere for how get normal maps to work in XNA with .X or .FBX exports from Blender?  I have seen a ton of tutorials on normal maps in blender, and a ton of tutorials on the HLSL code to get normal maps to work in XNA, but I have yet to find a source that talks about the entire work flow, from Blender all the way to XNA.

MukiEX:

Hit Ctrl+Alt+0 and the default camera (highlight a camera and hit Ctrl+0 to make it the default if there's more than one) will match the viewport.

Thanks. Very helpful.

Here is an update on the progress of Blender 2.5

http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/blender-25-project/

I'm just learning the basics of Blender and I'm having trouble with the relative positioning/rotation of my animated, armitured models when I export them.  I'm using the XNA Skinned Model sample and incorporated that content processor into my project.

Hi!

What a great thread, I hope it is still kind of alive. I've tried to read most of it and have found it very interesting. So I am a n00b and after much deliberation I've taken the plunge and decided to build something with XNA and Blender. I've done a coupla tutorials in each and am kinda getting the hang of it. At the moment I want to create a human avatar with simple texturing and animations. But I have a quandry....

I've built a mesh that I'm happy with and was about to get onto texturing it (via UV mapping) but it was brought to my attention that a more standard workflow for animated game content is (1) mesh (2) animate (3) texture. The reason being that animations may lead to changes in your mesh and you want your mesh to be set when you texture. But many of the tutorial I have been reading do the texturing before animation but I can't find a solid reason for this. So my question is bascially:

To get animated content to import into XNA from Blender what is the optimal workflow? I'm quite desperate to know as I don't want to lose time by having to backtrack.

Thanks!