DXF importer? how is it, and how to use it

General TouchDesigner Discussion
1

Hi,

what’s the status of the dxf format in Touch? and how should I use it? Precisely, I’m going to try and read some Poser dxf exported files. Does anyone have any experience with this pipeline?

Comments/Advice is appreciated,

thanks!
dani

2

The Autodesk FBX importer has support for a DXF->FBX converter internally, so we use them when importing DXF files. However we are tied to the capabilities of this converter, so if there are any problems we can’t do much about it. We suggest using FBX files directly.

The FBX Importer supports importing geometry, skeleton, lights, materials, animations.

3

Hi Malcolm,
here’s a FBX file ex-houdini using their autorigger in 9.5. see if it works for you. I find the hands for example not attached to the arms. Then there is no skeleton heirarchy root to attach the the deform sop…if I read a bgeo with the capture point attributes I get errors…(please recapture)
can’t unload fbx format here…can I send it via email??

4

ya please send via email. I’ll also get Ben to allow fbx/dxf files to put posted to the forums

5

The forum is now ready to accept fbx and dxf files for upload.

6

To update this, it the FBX importer is far more robust now. It’ll import skeletons, lights, materials, animations, geometry.

7

I am currently trying to import an fbx file exported from 3DMAX with issues around materials. Some of the materials load correctly on import and some dont. It seems to relate to certain object groupings?

Wondering if there is a standard process to think about when building/exporting for import to Touch?

8

So far there hasn’t been any reports of specific ways to export to FBX from other apps to make it work well in Touch. FBX is a very well structured file so I don’t know if that’ll be necessary.
The FBX importer is however very new, so it hasn’t been tested much. If you want to send your .fbx file to support@derivativeinc.com with a few notes about whats wrong with the import, I’ll try to take a look at it next week and extend the importer to support whatever features are missing to import your file.

9

I had some luck today with getting textures to show after import of fbx.
But I had to manually go into each COMP and assign the textures to colour
map properties before anything showed. This could be an issue as some of
the scenes will have lots of objects.

Now after that, i tried to save out to toe at which point my main comp
went black, as did all the sub comp’s.

Hope this helps and thanks for looking into it,

quine