FBX export and object origins

We’re doing a load of FBX exports to go into a VFX pipline into Maya.
We’ve been told that when imported into Maya, every object’s origin is at 0,0,0. So, when they want to rotate an object, they have to move object’s origin into the center of the object. With scenes with thousands of objects this is tedious.

As a workaround we import all our FBXs into Blender and run a script to automatically move the object’s origins to their volumetric center, then re-export the FBX from there. This works fine, but I wonder whether the Rhino FBX exporter could have this option built in?

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Note that Rhino does not have a concept of object local space as objects don’t have their own origin. Everything is indeed in world space. For instance objects you orient in a certain way will not retain that information.

That said I logged your request as

https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-61540

At most you’ll get the object origin set to their bounding box origin. Any other transformation will be lost (scale, rotation).

Hi Nathan,

Exporting using bounding box origin would be super helpful!

For now using Blender is your way to go.

Regards, a long-time Blender developer (:

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Export with origin works for these formats. So you could make a bounding box of your objects, select everything but your bounding box and run ExportWithOrigin and choose the corner you want.

Tim

If ExportWithOrigin gets the right results, you could script the process in Rhino to export each object from its volume centroid.

-Pascal

Andrew, how do you get that ‘script’ to run, like are you a programmer AND a designer? I’m not a programmer, so this is mainly why I ask. Just curious how or where do you run such a thing inside of Blender. Cause, you’re not just talking about a simple pass through or import/export using Blender as a middle man of sorts, or are you? …Like, is the script downloaded from a website for FREE and then with just a few clicks you’ve got it centered in Blender? …Also, does Blender export (most of the time) better to .fbx file format than Rhino 6 does?

Thanks @tim and @pascal. That looks like the way to go.

Wouldn’t this end up with a separate FBX file for every object? You could always export as objs and recombine them https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37785215/how-to-merge-two-obj-files-after-texture-mapping-process

Could blocks use their origin/rotation?

Yes indeed, that is why I specified that it would work if ExportWithOrigin gives the right results.

-Pascal

Couldn’t the Gumball’s local space be used for that? Each object has it, and it even survives a save/load of the scene.