Fuse>Blender pipeline, .OBJ export and missing materials ?

[Refeuh]

Hi !

I am using Fuse to create character faces to be rendered and used as portraits in a 2D game.

I came across a problem with Blender and I am hoping someone more familiar with the export/import pipeline can help me understand what I am doing wrong.

Just to give a bit of context, I am not a modeler or animator and I am not very familiar with modeling software, therefore it is very possible I am missing something stupid. Though as a game programmer with some rendering background, I've got some idea of what I am manipulating when it comes to meshes, materials, textures, shaders, etc.

Problem and steps to repro :
- Use Fuse (latest version to date on Steam) to create a basic character (head, torso, legs, arms, no need for clothes or accessories)
- Export from Fuse as .OBJ . I get the mesh and the diffuse / specular / normal map textures
- Import the .OBJ in Blender (latest "stable" 2.72b 64b)
- The mesh is correct, the textures are present, but actual materials seem to be missing and are all black
- Textures are displayed in "texture" mode in the viewport using GLSL, but rendering with materials the mesh is all black (with specular grey/white highlights, a light is present in the scene)
- I didn't see anything obviously wrong in the material settings (diffuse not set to pure black, etc.) but I'm no expert of Blender materials

I also tested a different pipeline : uploading for rigging and exporting as .DAE from the Mixamo website ; I can confirm this is working well, and I have been able to reproduce all the steps described in this tutorial video https://community.mixamo.com/hc/en-us/articles/204227123-Tutorial-Auto-Rigging-a-Blender-Character

So basically, exporting directly as .OBJ from Blender, I seem to be missing the material infos ; but uploading the same model for rigging and downloading as .DAE is working perfectly. Since in my case I do not want to animate the characters and only want to use the mesh to render some portraits, I would very much like to skip the upload/rig/download part which is a bit time consuming.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong ? Am I missing something after importing my .OBJ file ? Is there some black-voodoo magic happening when converting from .OBJ to .DAE ?

Thanks !

[Pte Jack]

I think that is a bug in Blender 2.72. I thought it was a problem with the imported OBJ material calls and had one of the developers to check it out, but later found that it didn't matter what OBJ file I imported I was getting the same result you mentioned. ALL black. I tried to refresh the material files being called and ended up having to delete the materials and reload them manually into Blender.

[Refeuh]

Oh, that's interesting ! I saw a few bug reports for similar issues, but they were for much older versions of Blender, I thought they would have been fixed by now.

As I'm not very familiar this software, can I ask how you reload the materials manually ? If that's working, it means there's a functional workaround and I can live with that :)

[Pte Jack]

Working on a quick video... Just have to see if it worked out and render it. I'll post a link as soon as I have it uploaded to YouTube

[Refeuh]

That's great ! thanks a lot for the help, 'much appreciated !

[Pte Jack]

Sorry for the delay, yuletide tech(hic)nical diffacultees... (lol) Forgot to show the actual problem in the video, had the mic muted because of background celebrations and forgot to turn it back on, had to do 7 editions I think it was. About to upload to Youtube now.

[Pte Jack]

Sorry for the delay... Try this... It will play at resolutions up to and including 1080p

http://youtu.be/yvc3_09ObEk

[Krasnerator]

Thank you for the video Pte!

[Refeuh]

Thanks a lot for the video ! That was extremely helpful - I've been able to reproduce all the stages you explained to rebuild the materials, and I can confirm this is working perfectly as a workaround for the bug :)

[Dev]

I have an even faster solution so you don't have to remake all of the materials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lU3LQQ9Rv4

[Pte Jack]

Did you even look at the date of this discussion???

That problem was fixed BEFORE Mixamo sold out to Adobe!

Talk about bringing out the dead!!!

[Dev]

It Is for anyone else who bumps into this problem still. I thought it was funny that I posted it.

[Irenoyd]

I made a tutorial about fixing materials issues when importing and Adobe Fuse CC character into Blender: https://youtu.be/I0luYBTXTEg

I also did another tutorial about fixing makeup issues on male character: https://youtu.be/hYjrkz5Nj4c

Hope it helps :)

[Legend]

one thing I found out with fuse models if your figure is black you need to change the normals to set from face to fix it, also if your hair transparency is not working you need to change the alph to blend type I think Hashed. also if you can see through your models its because the back face curning is turn on or off one of the two.