Differences between MHX2 and FBX

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Differences between MHX2 and FBX

Postby KorobeiJT » Thu Apr 15, 2021 2:41 pm

Hello everyone!

I'm new here and I need to use the format MHX2 and FBX. I have noticed that skeletons on MHX2 and FBX exports are differents.
Do you know why there is such a difference?

Thanks!
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Re: Differences between MHX2 and FBX

Postby Elvaerwyn » Thu Apr 15, 2021 8:37 pm

Greetings,

And welcome! So these are two very different file types that do similar things overall. The MHX2 is developed for makehuman specifically and will work best for most makehuman to blender related workflows. The FBX is proprietary to Autodesk and is thus an industry known format used by many programs including blender, unreal engine etc. FBX will work best from makehuman to another program directly based on personal experience. Without knowing more about which of the skeletons you use or what you are using them for or how you export or to where there is little I can offer about the skeletons condition post export/import.

More info on FBX:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBX

More info on MHX/MHX2

https://github.com/makehumancommunity/m ... n-exchange

Hope this helps you out some, good luck with your art and research going forward, always feel free to ask questions or contribute!

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Re: Differences between MHX2 and FBX

Postby KorobeiJT » Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:13 am

Thanks, Elvaerwyn for your answer but I have tried to understand the export system to FBX and to MHX2 and it's hard.

Actually, I want to use the MHX2 file because the textures on it are better than on the FBX file.
However, I need the FBX file to get animation from Mixamo, and only FBX files are taken in charge by Mixamo.
These are two aspects I want to combine with Blender in order to have well-textured avatars with nice animations.

But as I said in my previous post, skeletons from FBX and MHX2 are differents thus the combination of the two aspects is difficult.

Do you know a way to have better textures in an exported FBX file?
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Re: Differences between MHX2 and FBX

Postby joepal » Fri Apr 16, 2021 1:44 pm

FBX is in general very, very difficult to understand. It doesn't help that the format is proprietary and without functional public documentation. MakeHuman's rather shaky support for FBX comes from a blender library which in its turn is reverse engineered from some commercial library.

For maximum support in third part applications, I would suggest that you import your character to blender first (preferably via MPFB), and then export it from there. Blender's format support is vastly superior to that of MakeHuman. You will save yourself lots of trouble this way, even if you don't plan to use blender for anything else.
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Re: Differences between MHX2 and FBX

Postby Elvaerwyn » Sat Apr 17, 2021 9:24 pm

Allo again,
Not sure what your proposed workflow entails at all, but personally I have had some issues with exporting from blender to unreal and other programs, with textures myself. Since using the new blender especially! I managed good results by only using the principled shader tbh. Also under the settings panel in the materials you may trying to play with the settings there, will share a screenshot of what I mean.
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Re: Differences between MHX2 and FBX

Postby RobBaer » Sun Apr 18, 2021 12:50 pm

KorobeiJT wrote:Hello everyone!

I'm new here and I need to use the format MHX2 and FBX. I have noticed that skeletons on MHX2 and FBX exports are differents.
Do you know why there is such a difference?

Thanks!

As to the skeleton part of things, there are two things to mention. First, for your whole workflow, the choice of skeleton may matter. Inside MH, only the default skeleton is "real" the others are derived. MHX2, Both NHX2 and the Makehuman plugin for Blender are designed just for moving things from MH to Blender and generally get things to Blender intact. They are not designed for other downstream programs.

FBX is more of an "industry default", but outside the Autodesk universe there are many ways to express the same 3D information. I haven't played with FBX recently, but one of the issues used to be that some programs use a y-up universe (e.g., MH) and some use a z-up universe(Blender). This means recalculating coordinates when you make a move from one to the other. Blender (at least used to) have choices that can help you on import, but either MH's exporter or Blender's importer handled the mesh and skeleton differently in the process. You ended up with a mesh and skeleton that looked identical in Blender object mode, but if you went into edit mode the skeleton was at 90 degrees with messed up bone rotations. If you are careful you can fix this and apply all rotations, but as I remember, it is not completely straight forward. I'm not sure the problem was MH's. It could have been the Blender importer because it seemed to appear and disappear as new versions of Blender came and went. But, FBX was also more actively maintained at that time. And finally... my experience with exporting FBX from Blender and getting the same thing when I imported it back in with Blender has not always been good. One final comment about FBX is the handling of scale. It has a scale factor that different programs interpret differently depending on their default units. MH uses the "rare" decimeter units which I would NOT suggest using] during export from MH. I'd suggest meters during export from MH. Maya uses cm and 3DMax uses inches. However, some FBX files encode dimensions in native units with a scale factor of 1.0 and some use the scale factor . Best choices depend your entire workflow. I'm not sure how Maximo handles things.

Well there you have a lot of useless, dated FBX info... :D
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