[Suggestion] FBX to GLB offline converter

Hi. I think keeping heavy assets in the project is not the best option for users with a slow connection or firewall problem (China). So, it is very convenient for us to use the native .glb support feature.

But there is a problem with the .glb itself. It is not widely supported by popular 3d modeling software. It is not an easy task to export the correct .glb file from 3Ds Max or Maya, because they are relying on their .fbx format. And unfortunately, .fbx is much more popular than .glb. If you will make an offline .fbx convertor, it will:

  1. Make life easier for users without a perfect internet connection.
  2. Reduce the load on your own servers. People would stop using the Editor as an online file converter.
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As an alternative you can use Blender to easily convert FBX (and many other file types) to GLB.

It’s free and it’s quite powerful. Of course it won’t batch convert files easily (that requires a plugin), but it’s quite close to that.

This works pretty well:

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Unfortunately, Blender and FBX2glTF are not fully compatible with PlayCanvas. As an example, it is impossible to import blend shapes.
I had studied .glb structure by Playcanvas convertor. Typical blendshape data:

{
			"type": "VEC3",
			"componentType": 5126,
			"count": 1996,
			"sparse": {
				"count": 166,
				"values": {
					"bufferView": 68
				},
				"indices": {
					"bufferView": 66,
					"componentType": 5125
				}
			}
		},

But the same file made with FBX2glTF:

{
"componentType": 5126,
"type": "VEC3",
"count": 1996,
"bufferView": 12,
"byteOffset": 0,
"min": [
-0.0135115785524249,
-0.0042192074470222,
-0.0074337050318718
],
"max": [
0.0135115832090378,
0.0130863953381777,
0.00405951496213675
],
"name": "Face.M_F00_000_00_Fcl_ALL_Fun-3854"
},

So, all my blendshapes are importing, but they are not working correctly, they are blank.
Right now the playcanvas convertor is much more reliable than other solutions.

If you can create an issue here https://github.com/playcanvas/engine/issues and attach the glb file that you get using from fbx2gltf (or fbx), I’ll have a look at why it does not load, that should be few line fix.

1 Like

Yeah, sure. I’ve created it: https://github.com/playcanvas/engine/issues/2802

2 Likes