GH animation to .fbx

Grasshopper
1

Hello all,

I’ve been searching about how to export a GH animation to an .fbx. So far no luck, does anyone know more about this? Is it possible as of now? Will it be possible in near future?

Past post about same issue:
https://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/centipede/forum/topics/export-fbx-file

Thanks :slight_smile:

2

Interesting idea, I have not used this ability of FBX but just looked up how this pipeline works in UE4. It sounds like the geometry to be saved as FBX has to already have animation data defined for it in the originating app. GH saves out animations as individual 2D images for the steps of a slider so this won’t likely work. Rhino itself also doesn’t contain an animation option when exporting to FBX because there’s no animation keyframes or timeline to begin with in Rhino. The Bongo plugin for Rhino which provides mechanical animation tools may provide a way but I’m not certain. @andy can say for sure.

Without seeing the type of animation you’re making with the GH slider I’m guessing but you may be able to bake out geometry from various steps and then use those to create a keyframed animation in another app that supports this feature for FBX export.

3

I also tried that without success
but you can export obj sequence than import it in Cinema 4D or Blender

4

I’m looking for a similar workflow than what you described here, @anon39580149.
How can slider animations be exported as OBJ sequences, instead of images?

5

I used a plugin but forget it you can’t get what you want.
use Blender or Cinema 4D

1 Like
6

How if I can’t the geometry out?

7
1 Like
8

You will need a few plugins to make it work. I have done it in the past, if you look in the old forum you will still find a lot of stuff about it, even with some posts by me:

I made this ages ago using the process you are looking for:

Basically what you will need is:

  1. Use a looping plugin, I recommend Anemone, as its quite simple and works really well.
  2. It can run a set amount of times, which will be your number of frames. The loop output of the current frame is your driver for everything that needs to be animated.
  3. Use the Object Save component from Lunchbox to save as .obj files
  4. Run the loop and leave it running till it is finished
  5. Re-assemble in your favourite 3D software (I used Maya, but Cinema4D also works great)
  6. Profit :wink:
3 Likes
9

I remember @nathanletwory and @stevebaer were working on Blender to Rhino / Rhino to Blender tool with RhinoInside.

However I have no info about the status of that side-project.

1 Like
10

I did try at the beginning of the summer.

Current status: doesn’t work.

Rhino Compute does work though.

3 Likes
11

@nathanletwory Sorry for resurrecting a very old topic, Can you provide a bit of information on how to achieve this with Rhino Compute?

1 Like
12

Hello! Is there finally an easy way to create FBX animations with Grasshopper?

13

Yeah, Rhino is missing this whole area of 3D modeling - ANimations and rigging… No problem, we have Blender for that, but when one has a nice assemble or movement assigned to one slider in GH, it would be AWESOME to be able to export the positions of the objects as an .fbx animation. #featurerequest

2 Likes
14

x
x676×692 158 KB

It could make Rhino+Grasshopper attractive especially for Cinema 4D users who think Houdini is too complex, but still would like to generate simulations.