FBX is a scene-interchange format used by modeling and animation applications. It can carry mesh instances, transforms, materials and animation/deformation data. A correct geometry export needs to account for mesh placement, not simply copy local vertex arrays or choose an arbitrary animation frame.
- Geometry
- Placed polygon meshes can include nested node and geometric transforms.
- Units and axes
- Supported declared length units are normalized to mm here. Source axes are retained; missing units stay unspecified.
- Appearance
- Materials/textures may belong to the scene but are omitted by these geometry-first tools.
- Encoding
- Binary FBX versions 7.1–7.7 are accepted in the supported subset. ASCII FBX is not accepted.
Bake a static asset before using a mesh converter
For an animated or rigged character, export the intended static mesh from the authoring application. The local importer rejects animation curves, skinning and deformers instead of evaluating a pose. Empty takes that contain no curves are explicitly ignored.
Placements survive; rigging and appearance do not
The importer applies full geometry-to-world transforms and normal transforms to each supported mesh instance. OBJ output retains placed geometry groups; STL combines the placed triangles into one file. Neither result includes a rig, animation clip, MTL/texture bundle or boolean union of intersecting shells.