FBX Exporting Option

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to export complex 3D geometry from Roblox.
OBJ is simply too limited.

  • Can’t Export Bones.
  • Can’t export complex Geometry without large file sizes.
  • Many Duplicated Verticies.
  • OBJ Exporting is broken.

You can see a full list of FBX VS OBJ below.

This would be incredibly useful to many who export geometry from Roblox for Renders etc…

109 Likes

I wish to revive this feature request as the addition of .fbx export would be greatly benificial to me and other 3D artists.

A lot of clients i work for send assets through .rbxm files. Some of these contain .fbx meshes with vertex color data. If i were to export these meshes from Studio, all vertex color data would be lost, since i have no option to export as a .fbx. A lot of my time is spent coloring them again.

It seems odd to me that we’re able to import .fbx files, but not export them again. Having .fbx export would be fantastic. and i hope it can be brought on the table.

22 Likes

This is something we are looking into. Hold tight.

37 Likes

Any updates on this?
Exporting to fbx would be really nice, especially given we have fbx importing now.

5 Likes

Roblox is rad

Studio updates are okay.

but image

only has image

In all seriousness, Having no fbx export has been quite problematic in many occasions. A lot of time goes into fixing issues that could be easily prevented. Please bring this back on the table. This would be greatly beneficial for development.

18 Likes

We’re at a point in time where Roblox is beta testing PBR materials and mesh deformation, yet we still don’t have FBX export on an engine that supports FBX importing since 2016. If we don’t have this feature by the time mesh deformation is released, we’re going to run into a lot of problems.

20 Likes

It’s almost the end of 2021, we’ve seen Roblox release PBR materials as well as mesh deformation, but artists are still blocked from using these features outside of Roblox due to OBJ exporting.

Would really like to see an FBX option added, or give us away to write our own plugin to export FBX files.

10 Likes

I don’t understand. What is happening internally that makes it so difficult to implement this feature? All this big talk about smart mesh importers, layered clothing and mesh deformation, and no one seems to have said “Hey, our developers are really starting to rely on this .fbx thing, maybe we should add the option to export it out of Studio?

No, it’s worse. they don’t even think it’s worth their time. A game engine developed by a multi billion dollar company that can’t even export one of the most essential file types for external modeling programs, because they can’t fathom how this would benefit game development in any way.

But at least we have .obj export, right? Let me enlighten you. Roblox Studio’s .obj export is in a worse state than when it was released in 2014. Every export is a dice roll. Any improvements they added in the first few years are now broken. It’s a buggy unreliable mess, and i have complained about this many times. The complete lack of care on Roblox’s end ruined my passion for rendering.

20 Likes

I’d rather not have to resort to using external software such as ninjaripper to start exporting models.

5 Likes

It’s weird that you can upload a .FBX mesh but, you can’t export one out. I’ve actually stopped using Roblox meshes for this exact reason. Obj exports directly from studio are in fact a dice roll. Half the time, and I really do mean half, the object file that Roblox generates can’t actually be imported into Blender. It shows up as empty. At one point, I was trying to get a Roblox R15 character model as a reference into blender and it took me somewhere around 11 tries of doing the exact same thing to finally get one file to import correctly.

Any other engine (even the github ones with zero docs or sponsors) are able to correctly export obj and fbx meshes out of their respective environments. Roblox, for some odd reason, can’t. It’s weird that they have these grand visions of “we’ll be the next AAA game engine in the next year” at almost every RDC and to this day, you can’t export any other file type other than object file and the max resolution to any image has to be 1024x1024.

It’s laughable because, that’s all we really can do until someone stumbles across this as makes it a reality. It’s been almost 3 years.

16 Likes

It’s now been 3 years since Roblox was looking into .FBX exporting and unless Roblox got lost in a metaverse labyrinth I’m not sure what’s taking so long.

We now have:

  • A FBX Importer with PBR material importing support.
  • Layered Clothing
  • Layered Hair
  • PBR Materials
  • Skinned Meshes

We don’t have:

  • An FBX exporter that can export any of those without losing skinning data.

I understand that this feature isn’t priority however it’s severely affecting the rendering community.

22 Likes

Where is it then? It’s been years and yet OBJ files are literally broken when uploading to blender as they become see through. Not only that but we also have to remake any rigs exported.

3 Likes

No clue why this would take so long to implement, it would save so much time and fix a lot of the issues I have with exporting from Roblox

2 Likes

I really wish this could be revived, there has currently been no replies from current roblox employees, and having fbx support instead of obj or even as a 2nd option would be met with great satisfaction from the roblox development community.

3 Likes

Also, we have Dynamic Heads/facial animations, which are awesome…but if you export one of them as an OBJ, the face loses its expression and looks like “:neutral_face:”.

This means that it’s impossible to use them in GFX, unless it’s a custom head that the creator made (and can therefore replace the head with in Blender).

EDIT: I have a feeling someone will say that it’s not even possible to export one of these heads with an expression because it immediately resets to its default state when you click on the explorer list (defocusing Animation Editor). Well, that’s true, but I can export posed characters if I pose them using Moon Animator then export the character model without closing that editor. If that exports the pose, I don’t see why it can’t also export the deformed head mesh too.

7 Likes

It’s really frustrating how roblox has still not provided a way for developers to export things as .fbx. With all of these updates about mesh deformation, realistic faces, and improved animations and yet there is still no way to export as .fbx.

I really hope Roblox starts working on this feauture as it is really needed.

6 Likes

This needs to happen. It’s been 4 years, and this is actively causing problems. Having EVERY part be merged into one is annoying, but that’s not the worst issue. My main issue is that the exporter downscaling character textures. When the size limit for them is 1024x1024 (which also needs to change), texture’s being too big isn’t an issue.

3 Likes

4 years later and no .fbx lol…

For all the changes and advances Roblox studio has gone through somehow its most essential creative features remain so primitive.

1 Like

Whelp, they mentioned to me that they are going to be supporting more file format exports soon-ish, I’m guessing getting the importing to work is framework stuff.

1 Like

they also need to add the .gLTF exporting option as we need the .FBX option as they only have a legacy file named .OBJ, Blender classifies it as “Legacy”

1 Like