Exporting FBX from Blender to GIANTS Editor when everything else fails

Sometimes, somehow, the shading/normals get’s messed up when exporting directly to i3D files. I cannot pinpoint what’s causing it other than it may have something to do with triangulation, or missing parts for the normal map configurations for the material.

Anyway I tried something else for my normal map setup in Blender 5.0.1, and the setup looks like this:

Now the thing here is that I don’t exactly know if the Invert_Green node did anything. But the artefacts in the 3D mesh for the building was almost gone. Now this artefact was quite noticeable when I use stjerneidioten i3d blender addon, which mostly work in general, but it also based on the GIANTS I3D Exporter.

The thing with FBX is that all gets mostly exported out of Blender as it is. But there are some noticeable “take-aways” that occurs.

The export options for exporting to FBX from Blendere are these ones:

So in general I limit the exportation to Selected Objects. Object types are as default. Scale is set to 1.00 which means that it will show up as scale XYZ 100.0 inside GIANTS Editor. Now this can be fixed by using Freeze Transformations (which is a GIANTS Editor feature found on the menu line where it says Edit). What this does is that it will set scale to 1 (one) for all XYZ scales.

And If you have instances of the same 3D mesh, we want to preserve these.

The most important FBX exporting configuration I have to check is the Transform set to – (minus) Z Forward and Y Up. And I also have to make sure that the house (local/world mode) button inside GIANTS Editor is not activated, because the Y-axis for the 3D mesh should be pointing up in the sky when the object is selected.

Now when I import a i3D file of this building, these artefacts will show up. And no, they aren’t present when importing the FBX file instead.

And this is with the invert_Green node also. But when I tick Tangents ON and OFF and back to ON again (inside the Attributes Panel – Shape) in the editor, they are less present. And I yet don’t know why…

Now if you don’t find a export to FBX option inside Blender, just go to Preferences, Add-Ons…and search for FBX.

What I later found out was that I had some transparency in my normal map texture that caused these artefacts, since it wasn’t saved in BC1.