Exporting from Blender for Harmony

When exporting a model from Blender, you need to make sure it is set up to work properly with Harmony. Currently Harmony only supports polygonal geometry and FK bone rigs.

Before exporting you need to:

• Remove Constraints

• Remove/convert Nurbs geometry

• Remove Curves

• Apply Modifiers

Shape keys will render through the RenderBlenderBatch node, but their effect on the asset won't be visible in Harmony.

Collections

Collections do not export to FBX files and will not be displayed in Harmony’s 3D graph. If you want to make Harmony's 3D graph more organized, you can use an empty instead. If you parent your objects to an empty, they can act like collections/groups and will export to Harmony.

This only works with loose geometry. Any asset bound to an armature will not import correctly into Harmony if it is parented to an empty.

Armatures

Bones in Blender and Harmony have similar methods of displaying bones. There may be some differences in how they appear, but this is merely cosmetic. Regardless of how the bone is displayed in Harmony, the actual transformation of the joint will still be correct between Blender and Harmony.

If an asset with an Armature is going to be rendered through the RenderBlenderBatch Node, there are some additional considerations to take into account. In Harmony, the bones will always inherit all the transformations of their parents. This is not always the case in Blender, depending on the bone settings. Which can cause issues in how renders from Blender look versus how the asset looks in Harmony. To avoid this, bones always need to be set to “Inherit Rotation” and “Inherit Scale” needs to be set to “Full”.

When an FBX exported from Blender is loaded into Harmony, all the geometry will be located at the root layer. This is normal and unavoidable. It is a result of how armatures are parented to geometry in Blender.

Important FBX Export Settings

It is important to use the correct FBX settings when exporting from Blender to ensure they import into Harmony correctly.

• If you want the assets textures to display in Harmony you need to make sure “Path Mode” is set to “Copy” and ”Embed Textures” is turned on. This only works with basic shaders, more complex shaders or procedural textures will not be embedded.

  

• To ensure only the needed elements are exported it is a good idea to use the “Limit to Selected Objects option. You need to make sure to select the entire hierarchy for this to work properly.

• Scale needs to be set to “1.00”. Apply Scalings needs to be set to “FBX Units Scale” and Apply Unit needs to be checked. If these settings are not used, there will be scale and position discrepancies between what is seen in Harmony and what is rendered through the RenderBlenderBatch node.