For Senior Project at school, I was responsible for modeling and animating 3D fishes. The app that we were using required me to export the models into FBX file. I learned the hard way that exporting to FBX is a HUGE pain in the butt, and hopefully this article can smooth things out for anyone working with Maya & FBX.

Thing to keep in mind when exporting to FBX

• Deformer animations simply do not work. I’ve browsed through many, many forums looking for a solution but could not find an answer. What happens is that once exported to FBX, only the first frame will have the deformers applied, but not for any frames after that. This means that for the rest of the animation, the object being deformed will maintain the same shape from the first frame.
• Blend shapes work! You just have to re-arrange the Input Orders (explained later)
• Constraints may not alway work. I used parent constraints for my eyes and some of the controls, but they would do odd things when exported. For example, even though they’d work perfectly as an .mb file, in the FBX file there would be an offset on the objects that were constrained, so they wouldn’t be in the right positions.
• You have to delete non-deformer history after you smooth your mesh. Otherwise, even when your model is exported, it will still be unsmoothed.
• Make sure all your normals are facing the right way. To see normals, go to Display > Polygons > Face Normals. Not having the normals pointing the right way will mess up many things in the app/game, primarily the lighting.

Below, I’ve outlined the steps to properly export an FBX file. There is also a supplementary video that may help you get started. At this point, you should have the character modeled, textured, the joints and controls set up, and the mesh for any blend shapes created.

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A long time ago, I was hanging out with my bandmates Kevin and Chris, and we were talking about the kind of artwork we could eventually make for Move Your Mountain. The first thing that came to my mind was a cartoony, rockin’ Mountain-Man.

Inspiration

The “Meekrab” logo that I remember seeing from Harold and Kumar was my biggest inspiration. I never really knew what the Meekrab logo was for (according to Urban Dictionary, it’s for a band formed by the directors of H&K) but I always thought it was cool and memorable.

The Process

I first started with a simple sketch. In fact, I drew this really quickly on the bus in my notebook.

I later scanned the doodle, and brought it in to Photoshop. The sketch was far from perfect, but the idea was there. Basically I wanted a Mountain-Man with his arms in the air, with the text “MyM” below it. I needed the design to be in a circle because the first thing I wanted to do was make pins.

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On March 5th, Move Your Mountain played its first show at Zaphod Beeblebrox. Move Your Mountain is a power-pop trio that Kevin, Chris and I started in August 2010. We’ve been getting together once a week since September to jam, and March 5th was the night we finally unleashed our tunes. It was pretty intense practicing on weekly basis with school & work, but I’m really happy we powered through and continued to jam.

Needless to say it was a wicked-awesome night. The Start, a local cover band opened the night with some kickass covers of British hits. We played our set after The Start. I was nervous as hell at first since it was our first time playing our tunes in front of an audience, but the nervousness melted away after a song or two (I think I was melting too, I was so damn sweaty on stage… sorry for the B.O., guys). The headliner band, Brainhunter ended the night with some rockin’ tunes (BRAAAAAINS anyone?).

What was cool was that the next morning, we were mentioned in Andrew Carver’s blog on National Capital Rock. He’s also got some sweet pictures from the show on his Flickr.
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On Monday I finally finished my fall semester, and one of the many things that I worked on was a 3D animation. Throughout the semester we learned to model, rig, weight, and animate in Autodesk Maya, and our term project was to create a 3D animated short.

Here is the final animation, enjoy :)

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the result, but I wish I had more time to improve on certain areas. In particular, I want to improve the animations and timing. I was never trained in traditional animation, and I find most of Boomi’s animations a little ‘floaty’. In the future I’d like to study more about animation in order to get that tight animation that you see in Pixar movies. I would also like to have better voices and sound effects.
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