Avatar Importer plugin fails to generate attachments

Note that I am submitting this to Bug Reports instead of a Feedback channel since I have followed every documented direction exactly, as well as tried several permutations of solutions within reason.


So I’m trying to generate rigs for both an Rthro/R15 player model and custom rigs for vehicles and weapons for my game. I’ve used the article Importing Rthro Avatars as a guide (it really should be called something like “Importing Rigs” and rewritten to reflect that), and have followed directions exactly regarding the Rthro/R15 model as seen here:


image

This is how all the attachments (the ones that end in “_Att”) look on the character. The empties representing the joints are currently hidden for visibility:

This is what is imported to the file

Update: Randomly decided to retry exporting the above character from Blender and importing the .FBX file using the Avatar Import. For some reason, all attachments have successfully generated, despite not changing anything in the original .blend file

In a similar vein, I’ve tried creating a custom rig for a howitzer gun as an example; using the “custom” option for the avatar importer. The wheels are excluded from the export as they’re controlled by constraints rather than motor6Ds, so disregard them for now:


That attachment location in the back is supposed to be where the howitzer gun attaches to a vehicle to be towed. It does not generate on import, despite being appropriately named and parented:

What’s odd is that attachment points are generated, but only on the origins of any “_Geo” meshes. Note the locations of the attachment points compared to the orange dots in the Blender screenshot. This was the previous result of my attempts to import Rthro characters, which again, works all of a sudden.
Another weird thing is that, as seen in the above picture, the “_Att” mesh wasn’t even imported as a physical mesh, suggesting that the Avatar Importer did in fact recognize it as a mesh that was supposed to be something else, but didn’t actually do anything with it, let alone turn it into an attachment.


I’ve tried rearranging how things are nested, just exporting the geo meshes without any empties, removing and re-adding the Root and HumanoidRootPart empties, and so on. At this point I’m suspecting that either:

  1. The Avatar Importer plugin is broken and thus inconsistent and unreliable, or
  2. While not technically a Studio bug, the Avatar Importer page is incomplete or just plain incorrect.
    a. It should really be renamed to “Importing FBX Rigs” and updated accordingly with more comprehensive documentation.

I’ll be sending the howitzer-gun model that I used as an example above.
Howitzer - Avatar Importer Ready.blend (1.5 MB)

Here’s the .fbx for reference: Howitzer - Avatar Importer Ready.fbx (293.3 KB)

I looked around for a similar thread but somehow missed this one from last year until after I made this topic, except that that one never got a response. The OP of that topic actually did respond and said that naming one of the empties “head” (or possibly any R15 body part) and importing it as an R15 rig would cause everything else to work. However, that workaround didn’t, well, work.

The issue is that this whole thing sometimes works in certain circumstances that I have not been able to identify.

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After some fiddling around, I think I’ve discovered at least one characteristic that prevents attachments from appearing. It seems that the Avatar Importer does not like it if any object or mesh within the tree has more than one _Geo mesh child under it.

It might be that I happened to not attempt to include any cosmetics in my second attempt to import the PlayerModel at the start of my post, allowing the proper attachments to appear. Still, this is not documented if that’s the case.

Thanks for the report! We’ve filed this internally and we’ll follow up here when we have an update for you.

There is an issue with Custom import not creating attachments for _Att named mesh.
This will be fixed.

On thing to note, even with the old importer, I needed to do two things to get the hitch attachment to be created for the howitzer gun:
. I had to rename HumandoidRootPart to HumanoidRootNode. This is because attachments are only created under known R15 parts - eg. LeftUpperArm, LowerTorso etc.
. I then needed to move both Hitch_Att and Root_Att under the HumanoidRootNode - for the same reason.

The fix for Custom import not creating attachments does not have the requirement that attachments be under R15 parts - so once that fix is live you will be able to import the howitzer with the Custom option without any changes to the .fbx.

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Thanks for the workaround, and I look forward to the fix. This will help a ton with my game’s workflow.

I’ve tried the workaround steps you described, but the two attachments end up being imported as physical meshes and rigged with Motor6Ds.

EDIT: I imported using the R15 option instead of Custom, which generated the attachments correctly, but also generated attachments in the same position as all the Motor6Ds. I don’t know if that second part is intended behavior.

This issue should now be resolved! If this issue is still occurring, please create a new topic for us to look into.

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