HEXporter
Description
HEXporter is a Blender addon exporter tool designed for game artists.
The main goal is to improve workflow to quickly move between game engines like for example Unity/Unreal, and Blender, while developing assets.
One issue it tries to solve is constantly having to find and set your exporting paths.
The tool uses contextual export paths, this means you can set a different export path for different assets withing the same scene. A set and forget type deal.
Make your first pass mockup assets, set the export paths etc, then just tweak all you like and re-export with a hit on the button.
Another issue it tries to solve is the common need to merge meshes, cleaning up etc.
The tool will do all this automatically, meaning you can keep all your objects separated, retain any mirror modifiers or any other tools you use to keep your modeling workflow flexible and fast.
No matter if you have 100 different objects in the modeling stage, just hit export and the tool will clean it all up for you so you end up with a single object for your game.
Usage
The tool is currently located in the sidebar and will appear only if an object is selected and will look like this.
The first section is where you will see the name, this will indicate your current active collection.
You can press the little dot icon to select all object currently in this active collection if desired.
Below the name section you will find the export path, and a path selector button.
Either paste a correct export location, or simply use the path picker to locate one. This is where the exporter will export to. Note, this export path is bound to the active collection, this means that you can move collections between Blender files while still retaining the export paths, every collection has it's own export path.
Finally, below this is the export button, which, you guessed it, will export.
More specifically, it will export everything currently inside of your active collection.
It will do so as a single mesh, and will set the center of the current active object as the pivot point for the exported object.
Feel free to use any modifiers you like. The objects in your collections can remain separated, flexible and easy to work with, then just apply an export path if not done so already, select an object to use as pivot point, and hit export. Repeat as many times as you like until your asset is perfect.
Things to note
The tool only supports FBX currently, more options are planned, let me know which you would like me to add.
The tool will always combine everything in the collection as a single mesh on export, making this optional is planned.
It is possible to have an object selected which is not inside of the active collection, this is perfectly fine, but keep in mind that the exported will export all objects in the active collection, and only use the selected/active object as a pivot point. In this situation the tool will warn you, and give you a button that allows you to quickly make active the collection the object is housed in (if you instead want to export the selected object and not the current active collection.
It is also possible to place a single object inside of multiple collections.
In this situation the tool will warn you, keep an eye on the name in the tool to see which collection it will use to export. For sanity sake, I'd recommend to not house objects in multiple collections when specifically planning to use this tool, unless you have specific reason to do so.
Current supported versions
2.8
2.81
Release log
0.34
- Added install zip support
0.33
- Objects now center to world before export to improve functionality with engines like