Henrik Berglund

ndickson
I hear ya. The biggest difficulty with adding support for exporting Houdini's blend shapes to FBX is that Houdini's blend shapes support is *much* more general than FBX's blend shapes support. We'd need to have code to identify when a network happens to have exactly the right setup where it can be exported, and it'd fail in the vast majority of possible setups, so we'd need some way of trying to determine and then indicate to people what they need to change in order for it not to fail. Alternatively, we could slap together a bunch of heuristics to guess what might be closest, (which would also be a lot of work), but then it'd get into a mess of “Why doesn't this look like it did in Houdini?” Either way, there would still undoubtedly end up being some remaining differences.

If you really want it, though, please contact support to get added to RFE #70989 for FBX export of blendshapes, (unless you're already on it), and discuss recommendations there.

I wouldn't mind a new blend shape SOP just for .fbx export if adding support to the current one is difficult. Personally I want to make branches (copies) of the geometry so the vertex count would be the same, then modify the geometry with Edit or something and output that to a blend shape node, so nothing special really. Would this fail?

For now Blender works for me but I would rather make my characters in Houdini if it was possible.

I'm just hoping for .fbx blend shape export. It's crucial for game characters.

If you can wait for 4.13 there will be alembic support. I'm not sure how it will work in practice though.