I’m almost in tears trying to find an answer to this.
When trying to export an FBX file I cant get it to preserve crease for the hard edges that are mixed near smooth areas. This happens when smoothing groups are on during export. I have tried to export with smoothing groups off which preserves all the creased edges but then the smooth areas will not smooth at all. There has to be a way to do this since there are several things in the real world that contain both hard edges and smooth ones, anything cylindrical for example. Any help would greatly be appreciated.
What program are you importing the FBX into?
Unreal engine 4.10
Thanks, I’ve taken a look at this. The problem seems to be that the normals in the FBX file are being averaged for the whole mesh, without satisfactorily taking into account the creases. The Unreal engine doesn’t import the creases (at least I couldn’t see that it does) and relies on the normals only for the smoothing.
The only way I could get the result you’re after was by taking the mesh into Blender and following the suggestions here:
http://polycount.com/discussion/155012/exporting-smoothing-information-from-blender-via-fbx
I looked at the resulting FBX file and there is no crease or smoothing data, only normals.
In order to implement this for FBX export from ZBrush a new algorithm will need to be added as the current one (which uses the Autodesk FBX library) obviously isn’t adequate. I’ll do it as soon as I can but I’m not sure when that will be.
Thank you for your response. I will look into this workflow.
I did hope that with the new FBX exporter in zBrush the additional work within an external program to get static FBX models into unreal would have been eliminated, allowing to go straight from zBrush to unreal.
I believe there are many others wanting to do the same thing so a new algorithm that addresses this I think would be well received.
Again thank you for your help.