I have experienced the opposite for the most part. A mixture of soft and hard edges existing on one connected mesh, especially useful if no normal map is present or if it doesnt cover the edges being smooth or hard.
Nice point, I didn’t aware about normal map absence. Most of time I using smooth/flat to bake light maps, not for real time rendering.
when ideaman42 says:
@SaintHaven, committed, you can now import and export smooth and flat edges, faces.
I don’t if it solved the problem or not, because I can not load fbx with smooth groups I previously made:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84845057/smoothflat.FBX
@davyzhang, as far as I can see the last link you sent (from post 42) doesn’t contain smooth groups. (even if the application used them, it seems the export lost them), however FBX format does support them IIRC, strange they would not be written.
FBX doesnt store smooth/flat shading per object, neither does blender.
Strange,
I uploaded again, would you mind download it again?
I tried import the fbx file to 3dsmax, it shows flat and smooth as expected. I guess they stored it somewhere, but I can’t load the fbx file to blender, it raise an error : Couldn’t open file, but the file is there and no permission issues
It would be great if Blender finally would get a stable FBX importer !
A question: are your activities synced with campbells work? Ton mentioned in twitter that campell also is working on a FBX importer. I’m just confused about this two projects popping up recently.
And a problem 
:
I downloaded blender-2.68-r59377-win64 from the buildbot page a few minutes ago and tried to import a superman model from
http://tf3dm.com/3d-model/superman-39631.html
The importer threw an error message to me, something like “Version 6100 not supported …”.
So I converted the original file via the autodesk fbx converter to a 2013 fbx binary:
SuperMan.zip (751 KB)
I imported it into Blender and I got this error message:
Maybe there’s still something wrong with the importer.
ideasman42 = Campbell
For some users you just dropped a bombshell revelation.
fweeb = Jason 
It’s true!.. so painfully, dreadfully true.
LOL.
I was just trying to very gently prod that some users prefer to keep a separate identity here than elsewhere. Making a connection between a nickname and a real name is probably best left to the user. I’m not saying it is the case this time, but it is not as if he includes his name in his signature.
Ok. That explains a lot 
I didn’t want to lead the focus from my real problem…
Please make that superman can fly through the new FBX importer into Blender 
!
Working great for me except the 180 fix i had to do.
It really helped me since im moving a whole short movie (live action with a character) that was animated in max to render in blender cycles.
So what i do is i create point cache data to moving objects and exporting the fbx.
then in blender i re-connect every point cache to its object with the mesh cache modifier.
If animations were supported hen it would be the greatest thing ever!
Not sure if this is to do with the FBX importer or how blender handles the file structure internally… but this is back on my rediculous files i am importing…
So I imported a ~200 meg fbx file, which resulted in about 100k objects being created in the file, 50-60k of these were empties… i joined everything together and deleted all the empties and saved the file, 1.3gb… i tried closing, reopening and saving (sometimes it takes a few saves to really clear it out)… nothing… i then appended that one object into another file and saved that… 80meg… is this normal? or a bug with the FBX importer?
there was another file which went down from ~85meg to 4meg…
@jomeier, superman.fbx now loads into blender,
http://markmail.org/message/56y6favcw5bn3z5n
@EYBTM 180fix being orientation of data loaded?, this I wouldnt worry about now, first Im just trying to make sure the data loads at all. Animation support is just matter of time, all the data’s there at our fingertips
@doublebishop, this is blender-garbage-collection-internals stuff, not fbx related.
Note that I’d be happy to help some dev who likes to contribute to FBX improvements, It would be good to have some open-source collaboration going on here.
Thanks. Superman works great now 
Here I have another one which makes problems. I created a skyscraper in Sketchup, exported it as FBX 2013 and with the FBX importer in Blender I get this error messages:
found bundled python: D:\Downloads\blender-2.68-r59453M-win64\2.68\python
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “D:\Downloads\blender-2.68-r59453M-win64\2.68\scripts\addons\io_scene_fbx
_init_.py”, line 136, in execute
return import_fbx.load(self, context, **keywords)
File “D:\Downloads\blender-2.68-r59453M-win64\2.68\scripts\addons\io_scene_fbx
\import_fbx.py”, line 897, in load
_(); del _
File “D:\Downloads\blender-2.68-r59453M-win64\2.68\scripts\addons\io_scene_fbx
\import_fbx.py”, line 896, in _
fbx_item[1] = blen_read_geom(fbx_tmpl, fbx_obj)
File “D:\Downloads\blender-2.68-r59453M-win64\2.68\scripts\addons\io_scene_fbx
\import_fbx.py”, line 592, in blen_read_geom
blen_read_geom_layer_uv(fbx_obj, mesh)
File “D:\Downloads\blender-2.68-r59453M-win64\2.68\scripts\addons\io_scene_fbx
\import_fbx.py”, line 470, in blen_read_geom_layer_uv
uv_lay = mesh.uv_layers[fbx_layer_name]
KeyError: ‘bpy_prop_collection[key]: key “” not found’
location: <unknown location>:-1
location: <unknown location>:-1
Hochhaus.zip (169 KB)
@Ideasman42, Great looking work. Any chance of also building a .dll based version for C++ or C Ansi use, id love to be able to use the same import tool for my realtime opengl engine without having to use the FBX sdk (and not being able to release the engine with it). This could really help me out. Cheers
Is this compatible with FBX 2013? I keep running into errors.
Yay!
ideasman42
When i wrote 180 fix i meant for cameras and lamps but san already said how to fix it.
About animation, Im super excited! It will really help me with transferring stuff from 3ds max to blender.
Do you have estimations about when animation will be supported?
Obviously I will Include you and everyone who made this importer in the short movie titles!
@3DLuver, heres a standalone parser I wrote in Python3 which Blender uses (only ~150 LOC)
- https://github.com/ideasman42/pyfbx_i42
- https://github.com/ideasman42/pyfbx_i42/blob/master/pyfbx/parse_bin.py
- https://github.com/ideasman42/pyfbx_i42/blob/master/fbx_spec.rst
The Blender importer reads directly from the parser (a bit like reading Json or XML).
But it shouldn’t be so hard to port to another language.
@jomeier, fixed r4701.
@EYBTM, regarding 180 degrees rotation, I still dont have enough example files to compare to tell why some do this.
This file loads into blender without problems (exported from blender, updated with fbxconvert)
Since this loads into other applications fine last I tested, theres some other setting I need to read.