README

Mathias Preble's Unity run-time FBX importer

The Importers expect that your ASCII .fbx files are in a Models folder
and your .jpg files are in a Texture folder respectively. These folders
are in your Assets folder when working in the editor, or I believe in your
game_Data folder after a build. Also since this is importing at run time, there's
no real reason to compile your models and textures when building a solution from Unity.


Alright, inside the Source folder are 4 C# files:

FBXImporter.cs:
This is the meat of the project. It reads .fbx files made from Autodesk Maya
(it should work with 3ds Max too, but I need to test more), and builds Unity
game objects out of them. These game objects also include the pivot points
and parent hierarchy that was set up in Maya. Be sure that when exporting the
fbx from Maya, you export it as an ASCII type fbx (under Advanced Options->
FBX File Format).

I intend to expand the script to also import FBX files from Blender. Blender
uses an older version of FBX, meaning the output data is slightly different.

Also, the importer was tested using Maya 2013. I need to test FBX files from
2014 still.

Utilities.cs:
This file simply contains a few utility functions for parsing the FBX file.
They're more customized functions for reading strings basically.

TextureImporter.cs:
Since the fbx importer also imports UVs, I also included this short
script which imports .jpg files which you can use for textures.

BuildDefinitions.cs:
This file contains list references for all the models you import.
Basically what happens is the FBXImporter reads in the models,
builds the game objects out of them, and then adds the root object
to the modelDefinitions in the BuildDefinitions script. Then whenever
you need to access a specific model, search for it by file name (without
the .fbx) in the modelDefinitions list. Similarly, textures are stored in
a list in this file. Everything should be stored by file name short the extension.


Final point: NONE OF THESE SCRIPTS WORK ON THEIR OWN! To get this to work, you need
another script file that calls the relevant functions:
ImportAllFBX(); // from an instance of the FBXImporter
ImportAllJPG(); // from an instance of the TextureImporter

This is because Start() is an unreliable function to get things to work in the right way.
I actually had a very specific bug, but I can't remember what it was.