Exporting as FBX with embedded textures from Maya for sketchfab, unreal or unity

hi I'm Ben Shelly and in this tutorial we'll be learning how to export some textured geometry as FBX files from Maya we will set this up so we end up with one single file complete with all the texture information inside it this is a great way of sending 3d files between different computers as they can be imported from any location and instantly display the textures even if mayor can't find the original project directory so when I think I have my model ready I'll just do some pre-flight checks to ensure that our model is clean and ready for export so first of all I'll go ahead and select my mesh or my group and go ahead and delete history he should have a shelf set up with your center pivot delete history freeze transformations and reset transformations but just in case you don't also go to edit delete all by type history and then go to modify center pivot once you've done that we can move our geometry to the middle of the grid so hopefully you could find the grid in your scene and hopefully your geometry somewhere near it so let's move it over to the grid if we go to our top view and if you press W then hold down X as we move the object we just need to make sure we get the pivot that has been centered to the model we need to get the pivot to the middle of the grid exactly so hold down X and just move it over to the middle of the grid and just zoom in and obviously that should be just fine in 3d space though your geometry might be somewhere through the floor or something at this point so if we just go to a side or front view here we could just move geometry up so that it rests perfectly on the x axis like that and it's super important that you do this properly because of a step we'll do in just a moment okay once you've got it lined up properly we need to freeze transformations and this is going to help us force the model to remain in position during the next step so if we freeze transformation don't see anything change but you need it and now we can do reset transformations and this will snap the pivot to the middle of the grid wherever that is this doesn't send it to the base of your object it sends it to the middle of the grid which because of lined-up our object perfectly is also the base of the object it's usually best to have your pivot down at the bottom of the objects for when you're dressing a scene or something same for game environments as it helps you to snap the two terrain and things like that as well next let's go to the outliner to double check that everything is named properly so just go to the window outliner and as a consid just called group at the moment I just miss a for it's called this old bike and there's one more thing that we have to do we just have to make sure the FBX plugin is already set up in Mayer so if we go to window settings and preferences and then go to plug-in manager which need to double check that the FBX mayor plug-in is loaded so scroll down till you find FBX mayor MLL and make sure you check loaded and also loaded and now if you go to file and with your object or group selected click on export selection and I always avoid clicking export all because they never know if there's light that's hiding in a distance and it's going to throw everything off so just so that's what you know you'd want to export and then go to export selection we can click direct in the text or if you can click on the little box next to it and we get the export selection options pop-up just make sure we choose FBX export which should be near the bottom of that drop-down list and the first if you do play around in here you might notice that lots of stuff is greyed out you might be thinking why can I include texture information don't worry we'll do that in a moment so just oh we have to change in here is FBX export and then go to export selection also feel free to setup your own presets for your exporting as well but we can customize this in the next step so click export selection and this will take us to the window here where we can choose where to put it so just go to your projects whatever project wanna do I'll just do default for now I usually export single objects to my assets folder and so I can have a nice library in my assets folder of what I once including this scene and then over here on the right we can just check some options here so the first thing that we need to check is that we have the embed media option if you go over to file type specific options and then down to the include option down here we can drop down it's got geometry animation we can tell it whether or not to include animations which can be useful if you've got if we're doing this to a whole scene it can be useful to include lights and cameras or to force it not to include those if if you want but if you're just doing simple objects the most important thing you need to make sure is checked is embed media and this is referring to the textures which will make sure that we explore all the textures into the single file no extra folders will be created next to this so it keeps it nice and neat the final thing is to use a Maher ASCII file format ASCII files are slower to open in Maher then the binary ones and they're also slightly larger but they are usually backwards compatible and if there's any problems further down the line you can actually open up the ASCII file in a notepad or text editor and change things that might not be working for a certain user so ASCII file then we can name it so just going to name it like old double check we've got FBX export there obviously and then we can go to export selection now if we go to a new scene or if you really want to make sure it's working you can even open up may own a totally different computer okay now that we've exported the model we can see that we should just have one file there an FBX file and if you hover over it you should see the file size is pretty big this one's 10 megabytes and has probably because it includes seven textures so if I just check my hyper shader for the file that I created the bike in I can see it's out I've got seven textures here and there they are all bundled into that simple FBX file if we go into a new brand new machine even if it's on a different computer with out these textures on it at all we just go to file and go to import and navigate to wherever this is I would highly recommend moving the FBX file to your assets folder there should be in the directory that you created even if it's not in there it'll still work but if you just load it up and press import you might have to press 6 on your keyboard to show a shaded view and you can see that everything's working there now as soon as you import your geometry and view the textures you can see there's a folder created now next to the FBX file and this does contain all the textures for master source from it so this will appear to any FBX file that has been imported into a master scene so this process is very popular if you're using stock assets that have been created further back in the production pipeline to quickly address environments the only drawback to this method is if several exported object files share the same texture that text will also be duplicated within the file for each export so for example if I have a look at this scene here I've got this really old fridge and it shares the same texture as the frame for this bike so if I locate the texture and the hypershade and just go to edit select objects with materials we can see here I've got two different objects but the same material applied this is quite an efficient way to keep file sizes low if I was to export this fridge separately and this bike separately all of their textures would be separately bundled into their own FBX files and this is perfectly acceptable for unique assets especially if you've carefully crafted textures into the geometries UV maps in Photoshop or on Mudbox but in situations where project file size is a big concern it probably best to exclude the textures from the export and make sure they're linked to a common texture within the project directory but if you're looking for a really quick way to export or move or unique assets between computers then this is a great way of doing it and you even if the directory changes your models will still retain its extras

Channel: CGI Tutorials

Views: 129,530

Keywords: exporting as fbx from maya, fbx embedded textures, maya, how to load fbx plugin, embed media, export with textures, center pivot to base of mesh

Id: hznxFmnB2to

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 18 2013