📤 Blender Export Process

Warning

Make sure to read the entirety of 📀 Blender Customization before continuing!

Exporting the Custom Dragoonoid

Before we begin, keep note of which option you’ve chosen in the hierarchy. It'll be useful when assigning materials later. You’ll know which one is selected when it’s highlighted like so:

Joining the options with its associated mesh

We need to combine the options you’ve chosen in the “Body” section into one Body mesh!

Go back to Object mode, make sure nothing is selected by clicking in empty space. In the HIERARCHY, click all the meshes in the Body section while holding CTRL, and make sure you select Body LAST. Do NOT select the Armature/Bones. You can undo a selection with CTRL+Z.

You should have something that looks like this:

With Body selected last, put your cursor in the SCENE/VIEWPORT area, (not the hierarchy), then press CTRL+J to join the meshes into the Body.

When merging, things might have appeared on the model. This is normal and should be ignored.

Repeat this process for Outfit01. If you don’t plan on using certain articles of clothing, you can simply hide them with the eye icon and not merge them with the Outfit01 or Outfit02 mesh.

And the same process for Outfit02

Danger

Do NOT merge Body into anything! Also, Do NOT merge Outfit01 into Outfit02! At the end of this, you should have 3 meshes: Body, Outfit01 and Outfit02!

You are now ready to export the model! However, you need to export in a certain way in order for Unity to interpret the model correctly and to ensure useless bones are not exported.

Select everything currently visible in the scene. Put your mouse in the viewport and press “A” on your keyboard until everything visible has an orange outline.

Export Settings

With everything visible selected, go to the top left and click File>Export>FBX.

You need to export the FBX. Name it “TDR_Dragoonoid_SFW”. If you want to export it directly into the Unity project, make sure to replace the matching FBX file in Assets>TDR_Dragoonoid>FBX. Make extra sure the Armature is selected! You can also temporarily export the FBX somewhere else if your Unity project isn’t set up yet. Just keep where it is in mind!

You can save these export settings as a preset by clicking the “+” sign next to the drop-down menu above the export settings, which will make it faster to export in the future, and hopefully make it less likely for mistakes to happen! I personally named this preset “Unity Deform Off”, since it’s a Unity preset that discards bones that have the “deform” value set to off.

These settings are specific to my own workflow! Other avatar makers might need to include non-deform bones that are used for different purposes, or might not know that FBX units/FBX all is the proper way to apply scalings, so there is a possibility that using this preset could break other avatars!

Warning

you don’t need to remove the menu to export to any other platform! THE MENU AND ALL USELESS BONES ARE ALREADY DELETED ON EXPORT! Deleting the menu only makes it harder and more time consuming to work on the model!

Note

After exporting, you can go back to Blender to undo the previous merge actions. I would suggest not keeping it merged in case you want to add or remove things in the future.

Export settings Explained (Optional)

If you’d like to know why these export settings matter and why I use them:

Selected Objects

We need to make sure that only Selected Objects (or what’s visible) are exported, otherwise the entire project, including the substance setup, will be exported. We don’t want that to happen. Make sure it is CHECKED

Apply Scalings

We want the “Apply Scalings” option to be FBX Units scale or FBX All, because otherwise, Unity will interpret 100 centimeters as 100 meters, or something along those lines. This setting ensures Unity gets the scale right.

Apply Modifiers

“Apply modifiers” is situational. It’s usually a bad idea to have this enabled because certain modifiers can’t be applied with blendshapes, and you know what happens when you try to export with this setting on and with one of your meshes having a modifier that can’t be applied with blendshapes? All of your Blendshapes get deleted on export in order to apply the modifier. It’s pretty common for beginner avatar makers to run into this issue at some point.

If the modifier can be applied with blendshapes, it might not give the result you want, for example: “apply modifiers” when a mask modifier is active will delete the mesh that’s currently being hidden by the mask modifier.

Deform Bones

We want to export with only Deform Bones CHECKED, because some options on my avatars, like hair and ears, have unique sets of bones that are useless depending on what you chose and will only make your avatar unoptimized. I have used drivers to automatically set the deform value to “off” on bones that are not needed for your chosen options. These useless bones will be discarded on export thanks to this option. If you’re exporting avatars from other makers, you might want to consider unchecking this unless the maker specifies to check it.

Leaf Bones

Leaf bones add extra bones at the end of each chain of bones. This is normally used to get the endpoint position of a bone, as Unity can only tell the position of the start of the bone, not where it ends. This is mostly useful in the context of Physbones, but it’s easy enough to manually add an end bone when needed. Nobody in their right mind should ever leave this on, as it tends to add hundreds of useless bones. This is not needed and would create unnecessary bones that will hinder performance. leave it UNCHECKED.

Bake Animation

I have created all visemes and poses for the bones using animations in blender, in case I needed to access them later. Having “Bake Animation” on would export these animations. These are not needed as the required animations are already in Unity. Exporting with this option active might pose your avatar in an undesired way on export, and will take significantly longer to export. Leave it UNCHECKED.

Success

If you want to customize your textures, head to 📗 Substance Painter Projects.

If you want to import the model into Unity, head to the 🥡 Unity Import Process.