Blockbench Importing with Community Plugin

Justin

Exciting news about Blockbench support! 🥳

Community member mail.wi created an export plugin for Blockbench that fixes a few current issues with loading .bbmodel files. Give it a try and reply below with what you've imported into RPG in a Box!

UPDATE: The plugin is deprecated, you should now use the converter utility here:
https://github.com/mailwi/riab-blockbench-plugin/releases/tag/blockbench_converter

Download the plugin here:
https://github.com/mailwi/riab-blockbench-plugin/blob/main/rpginabox_blockbench_plugin.js

Thank you so much to mail.wi for sharing this with the community and for taking the time to create this instructional video demonstrating how it works! So awesome to see the community helping each other out in ways like this. ❤️

JDiPerla

Wait so does this allow animations to now work in riab?

Justin

JDiPerla I haven't tested the plugin myself, but it appears so. I'm not sure if this takes care of every possible scenario, but it's definitely worth giving a try!

skumleren

Not done anything in blockbench before, but sounded interesting so gave it a go, Granted it is my first model, but it sure looks like something is not lining up with or without plugin, any guesses?

mail.wi

skumleren Hello. Don't use cubes (they have limited options and it is pointless to support them)! And you need a root bone with pivot point to 0, 0, 0.

skumleren

mail.wi What a beautiful mouse!

My now well-aligned rat says hello! Many thanks ^^

skumleren

Many successfull imports later, something has once again gone awry. Unlike the previous example, the animations are fine on this model, but the figure itself did not seem to survive the transition even though living up to the previously mentioned speccs. Got a guess? Too many strange angles? Too many meshes in one bone?

mail.wi

skumleren Hmm, that's weird. Can you show the structure of your model?

You may have rotated the meshes using bones. All bones should have the rotation set to 0, 0, 0.

DKSubconscious

So I tried with a daft cake, I managed to import it into an object with zero property options. THEN, found out how to attach it to another object or character which was all good, just duplication. I was wondering with an attached model how are you supposed to activate animations stored within it?

It seems that people are doing it but there are no tutorials for it :-(

skumleren

DKSubconscious Is this a blockbench related question? Otherwise attached objects should play the same animation name of the thing it is attached to. So if you have a sword object, add an idle, walk or attack animation to it. Let's say you paint your sword red in its attack animation and green on idle. When attached to the player or npc, it'll turn red when the player attacks and green when he is idle, and in this case, just have the default animation when walking.

DKSubconscious

Thank you very much!!! Does this also chain through attached Objects? I can't wait to test this out tonight when I'm back from work! I can test my own question too :-P

skumleren

DKSubconscious Uf haven't tested. If it doesn't, it sounds like it is something that Justin could quickly crank out in the next patch.

DKSubconscious

skumleren I tested it last week and yes you can chain, I did it first with default voxel objects and then I attached to an object a blockbench mesh with the same animation names and it chained through that!! So thank you for the advice :-)

skumleren

mail.wi

Assuming this is the structure you are looking for, don't think I've touched no bones from what I know, guessing you are refering to pivotspoints and folders in the animation edit, never seen no bones menu in the actual editing part. Looks like all the guilty meshes are just rotated normally.

mail.wi

There is also a beta version of the export plugin with improved performance: https://github.com/mailwi/riab-blockbench-plugin/blob/main/rpginabox_blockbench_plugin_beta.js

mail.wi

skumleren Thanks for the reply! I seem to have figured out what the problem is. I'll try to fix it and update the beta version of the plugin 🙂

skumleren

mail.wi Very nice!

Can you fix the bug that decreases the fps when only using a couple of thousands meshes? xD

mail.wi

skumleren I'm not a wizard, but it would be nice to have that optimization 🙂 Alas, of the available optimizations that can pull this is only Nanite in UE5, and that only with a 4090 graphics card 🙂

mail.wi

Updated the beta version of the export plugin. Fixed a bug with mesh rotations. Added support for rotation of bones (groups) in edit mode.

skumleren

mail.wi many many thanks, will do a little tester tomorrow and it'll probably be fixed ^^

skumleren

mail.wi Donno which part of the fixes fixed it, but it sure is fixed! Thanks one again.