Blender - Animation

BLEND

We support animations in the native Blender .blend format. We are actively working to make this feature more robust and reliable, and we would love to get your feedback.

You can follow the conversation, report bugs, and contribute tips on the forum.

What is animated:

• Object are animated with solid animation
• Armatures are animated by both solid and bone animation
• Constraints: objects moved by constraints in Blender will also be animated on Sketchfab
• Shape keys: we currently support relative and absolute shape keys. Note that the interpolation for absolute shape keys is not taken into account for now, it will always look as if it was set to Linear. So if you use other interpolation type (e.g. Cardinal), your animation will not look exactly the same once uploaded. This is something we will improve in the future.

How actions are supported on Sketchfab:

• If your scene has only one animated object (action, nla_tracks): each available action leads to an animation with the same name
• If your scene has several animated objects: you get one single animation, where all objects are animated by their current active action. The duration corresponds to the current Blender scene duration
• All actions are baked using your current scene fps setting (so that the speed in the same within Blender and on Sketchfab)

At the moment, we don’t support all Blender’s animation features. There are still some of them that will have no effect on Sketchfab:

• Deformation by bone's envelope is not yet supported. As workaround, you can generate vertex_groups from envelopes.
• Animations based on modifiers that are not Armature modifiers: if you use a Hook or a Mesh deform modifier, its effect will be lost or buggy on Sketchfab. Another example: if you Mirror an animated object, you will not get the same result on Sketchfab.
• An object animated by more than one armature
• Also note that modifiers used on objects with shape keys will lost their effect: if you can't apply modifiers manually, they will not be applied on Sketchfab

FBX

This tutorial has been adapted from the community generated Animation Wiki.

Exporting with FBX 7.4 Binary usually gives the best results, just make sure that you select the Mesh & Armature categories and check Selected Objects to avoid complications.

Unchecking NLA Strips and All actions works best for solid animation or rigs with only one action.

Sometimes the Blender FBX exporter can crash on long animations. Learn how to reduce the number of keyframes with this tutorial by Dennis Haupt: How to Export an FBX file from Blender with reduced keyframes.

Make sure all your bones in the rig are parented to a main bone that has the entire model assigned to it to avoid parenting issues when Sketchfab converts the model.

IK rigs: make sure you use them correctly and make the controller for them separate from the other bones.

Use the Bake Action feature in Blender before you export a FBX. If you bake all actions in Blender and delete all the unused actions later you don't need to change anything in the FBX exporting settings, all animations will work in Sketchfab like you see it in Blender. It works for Poses and Objects, also you can clear all Constraints and Parents.

At the moment Sketchfab assumes subframes, even if you use constant interpolation mode in Blender. A workaround in cases where constant interpolation is absolutely necessary is using a zeroscale for the bone or object for several frames (3 should work) and move the object in that time. (Think of a chimney emitting transparent spheres for smoke, you dont want them to fly back into the chimney because of that interpolation).

The Static Pose in Sketchfab depends on the frame when you export it.