New Unity Script Needed / Rant

[Polterguiest]

Hi all,

I appreciate this is going to be bit of a rant but I believe its justified and before I begin I understand I can use another program Spine, Blender or I could export as sprite sheet so on an so forth my point is FBX Support and MOHO using this as a selling feature

The fact that MOHO continue to advertise the below on their main selling page is a joke!
"FBX Support for Unity™ Game Developers
Unity™ game developers and users can use FBX support of animated 2D content in Moho Pro, eliminating the need to create rigid sprites for game development and providing the ability to get the exact look and feel that they want. FBX, the adaptable file format for 3D animation from Autodesk®, is the most common method for integrating animated 2D and 3D assets in Unity."

There has been little to no support to get files from MOHO to Unity successfully since version 12 and whatever version of Unity was back then (I might be wrong and happy to be corrected). Unity is constantly updating with new versions all the time and as such the import script created by MOHO must also continuously be updated with new scripts published to the website/forum for download, either that or drop the feature and remove this as a selling point on your homepage. I am a beginner programmer and have no idea how .fbx works in MOHO and how it works in Unity. I have read that MOHO uses ASCII and Unity is Binary so this could be causing an issue but I have no clue on how to produce a new script to make this work. I just got version 12 and was excited for the new features of 14 however the program was purchased for use with Unity and it doesn't work leaving me with no option but to look elsewhere which is real shame because I love the program and animating in it. (A user since Anime Studio 7)

The sad thing is people have been complaining about this since 2017 (maybe longer) its now 2023 there has been 2 MOHO Version upgrades (including 14) and yet this selling point aka false advertising is still being neglected!

I have done a console dump from my Unity project below however more needs to be done as "Many Moho commands (point binding, curvatures, bone stretching, etc.) are not supported in FBX format" so even if a new script is created a lot of the features / benefits of using MOHO wouldn't even work anyway.

Unity Console Dump: I DID change to resampleCurves it didnt change anything
Assets\Editor\AnimeStudioFBXImporter1.cs(18,4): warning CS0618: 'ModelImporter.resampleRotations' is obsolete: 'use resampleCurves instead.'

ImportFBX Warnings:
Can't import normals, because mesh 'Body|0' doesn't have any.
Can't import normals, because mesh 'Head|5' doesn't have any.
Can't import normals, because mesh 'Left_Foot|3' doesn't have any.
Can't import normals, because mesh 'Left_Hand|2' doesn't have any.
Can't import normals, because mesh 'Right_Foot|4' doesn't have any.
Can't import normals, because mesh 'Right_Hand|1' doesn't have any.

UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent (int,intptr,bool&)

Mesh 'Head|5' has no normals. Recalculating normals.

UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent (int,intptr,bool&)

Mesh 'Left_Hand|2' has no normals. Recalculating normals.

UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent (int,intptr,bool&)

Mesh 'Right_Hand|1' has no normals. Recalculating normals.

UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent (int,intptr,bool&)

Mesh 'Body|0' has no normals. Recalculating normals.

UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent (int,intptr,bool&)

Mesh 'Left_Foot|3' has no normals. Recalculating normals.

UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent (int,intptr,bool&)

Mesh 'Right_Foot|4' has no normals. Recalculating normals.

UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent (int,intptr,bool&)

Rant over. Please MOHO fix this

[JoelMayer]

I agree that if it's advertised it should either work as expected or just be removed. Personally i wonder if it wouldn't be easier/wiser to get a third party to program a good interface between Moho and Unity via FBX export because it's really a whole different beast to just exporting videos and needs a different set of expertise. Moho was always mainly an animation software for film/video so yea, maybe the developers are a bit in over their head but that's just speculation.

[Daxel]

I agree that if it's advertised it should either work as expected or just be removed.

+1.

As someone who has animated for game studios working with Unity and Godot, we had to rule out the possibility of using Moho's FBX and decided to use Moho only to create sprite sheets.

Between those two options (to make it work or remove it), I would love Moho to bet on this fast growing gaming industry with support for Unity but most importantly Godot, because this relatively new open source game engine is growing in users faster than any other. As examples, if you check itch.io most used game engines this week, Godot is at the top with 439, more than Unity, Gamemaker and Unreal together (258). If you check reddit communities, Godot is the one with more online members at any given moment between the top game engines (right now 881 vs Unreal 599 and Unity's 679).

I would also bet on glTF instead of FBX, because its open source nature is making it a new standard in 3D while FBX is too old, and has many problems with being a closed propietary tech by Autodesk. More about that here: https://godotengine.org/fbx-import/

But yeah, priorities, resources and stuff. I would understand if this is not a priority, I don't know how costly is to add support for this.

[JoelMayer]

My guess is this is a pretty complicated thing to do AND to support in the long run and it's just never been Moho's focus so there's probably not that much expertise around (yet).

It's basically a whole other industry, market and target user group with their own needs and requests. This is why i GUESS (granted, uneducatedly) that it might be a more viable to have like a third party plugin for game runtimes.

Another thing that i would LOVE to see is something like Lottie support for web animations but again, it's a whole other can of worms and i understand that you can't do everything. That's fine but then you gotta be honest about what the software is and isn't.

[Daxel]

If that is the case like I said I'm fine with Moho just not supporting it.

I wonder if just supporting glFT would make Unity and Godot (and other game engines) users and contributors develop and support themselves open source plugins for their respective platforms, as that was probably not possible with FBX being closed tech by autodesk but glTF is open source.

[Polterguiest]

Well looks like they have removed this feature from the web page no response, just now removed.

[Daxel]

It makes sense to remove it for now, even in the case they plan to fix it. I would like to know though. But maybe they haven't even decided yet, who knows.

[timf]

As someone who regularly needs to export assets to Unity: FBX can sometimes be a miserable experience. I generally use Blender when working with game engines, and although it's FBX exporter is much improved it is still prone to problems and frustrations. The FBX format is owned by Autodesk and afaik they do not share the source code with 3rd parties. This must make it difficult for software developers to support it reliably.

I suggest that unless you're using Autodesk products, it's worth considering avoiding FBX entirely. Of course, that could be easier said than done. If I have a game project where I use Moho, I'll be exporting via sprite sheets. Going forward, I'd like to see support for 'open' formats such as Lottie and glTF.