I've got a problem with exporting a character model from blender to fbx-format. I have tried both the standard script as well as the one provided by Fritz at tripleb. The model has different textures applied by UV-map for his pants, torso, head and so on. The strange thing is I've been having som trouble getting all of the textures to display properly at the same time. Yesterday I had some problems getting the head texture to show. Finally somehow I managed to get it there (mainly by applying it over and over in blender and doing a lot of exports) but the the pants disappeared. All this time I get a warning that "There were vertices which did not contain vertex colors in the following mesh or meshes: Hero_body".

Even stranger is that I managed to export to .x-format and it displays perfectly, at least in direct x-viewer. I could of course give up and use .x format altogether but I want to add animation later on and I have been reading that the fbx format is better for that. Also I do this mainly to learn so I would like to know what could be wrong... Anyone has an idea or has encountered the same problem?

I'm using Blender 2.46 and I am importing the files to the basic 3D tutorial project.

Mike

 

PS. A minor friction in comparison, the model seems to be reflecting more light when using .x than .fbx. Anyone know why?

Phew after working with this problem constantly for 2 days now I finally solved it :) After applying and reapplying a few times and thereby switching between seeing the head texture or the pants texture I tried putting the texures of arms and torso in the same .bmp file and reapplying the uv-map for that. Suddenly everthing works perfectly.. To me it seems that the only thing I really changed was decreasing the total number of textures on the model from 4 to 3. Could it really be that there's a limit of number of textures on the same model?

If anyone know plz reply, I would like to know why it's been behaving like this tha last few days..

/Mike

PS. I also managed to get my model animating doing a headbanging motion :) Thx to Fritz at TripleB for making a great fbx-exporter and also kudos to Stromcode for great tutorials on the subject. Ok, I'm off to finally typing some code now :)

I'm not sure what the maximum number of textures on a complete model is, but I think there is a limit of one texture file per mesh in a model.  So if your model is one single object/mesh, then you're stuck with one texture file.  You can break your model in to sub-meshes/objects by selecting faces and separating them from the original object (use the P key to separate faces in edit mode, using face select to pick the faces you want in the new object, and then in object mode you can select the different objects, then go into edit mode and apply different textures to each one of these individual submeshes using different files).  I've done this and it does work. If you have questions, just google for "blender separate mesh" or a variation and you should find plenty of tutorials that explain how to do this.

 Probably what was happening when things seemed to be intermittently working was that whenever you applied textures, and changed things around on your model, it could have changed the order that things were written into the .fbx file when it was exported, and when the content processor in your xna prog read this in, it probably used the texture that was first in the list when the model was imported.

 

Fred

Well I got it working now, using three textures on a model consisting of one mesh. You're probably right about changing the order of textures, that seems consistent whith which ones where showing. Thanx for the tip about making breaking up a model into sub-meshes, that might come in handy!

/Mike