Importing Gemoetry from Cinema/3rd party 3D software

How-To
1

There’s probably a few threads about this on here already, but there’s a lot of different answers and questions so I thought it would be nice to have a thread with some tips that you pick up along the way.

I’ve used Cinema a few times to create or edit geometry before importing it to Notch, but I’m almost always having issues with it. Sometimes FBX is the easiest way, sometimes it’s alembic. Almost never OBJ.

From what I’ve found, Notch gets an error message whenever I try to import geometry with selection and phong tags. The message reads: unknown error.

For importing animated geometry, alembic seems to be the way to go, at least when the animation is mainly from mograph. Baking frames doesn’t seem to be necessary.

At the moment of writing, I’m trying to get groups in my geometry to go through into Notch, but I can’t get it to work. Hopefully I will find a solution and post it here soon!

2

If you can attach a sample C4D scene, the problem can become more specific, otherwise now it’s too abstract to troubleshoot.

I’ve never had any “unsurpassable” issues with OBJ but then again the stuff I tend to export are not that complex and I always try to break down scenes into multiple objects for better control.

3

The scene I was working on was a room with furniture so the solution I found was to just connect the objects in cinema since I didn’t need control over them in Notch.

I guess every situation has a unique solution, but is there like a general rule of thumb for exporting geometry from other softwares? Like, what’s best for textures, for animation, file size and so on