FBX is a delivery format: a snapshot of geometry, materials and animation arranged the way the receiving tool expects. The .blend is the workshop it came from. Every export question is really the same question - what does the receiving tool know how to read - and every answer is in the prep checklist below.
What FBX keeps - and what it leaves behind
- Keeps: geometry, normals, UVs, armature and weights, animation as keyframes, and material basics - base colour, roughness, metallic, normal maps.
- Leaves behind: procedural shader setups, noise and texture nodes that were never baked, constraints and drivers, particle systems, and anything that only exists as a Blender concept.
- Applies silently: modifiers, at export time. A subdivision you forgot about becomes permanent geometry in the delivered file.
The prep checklist, in order
01 - Apply the modifiers you mean. Look at the modifier stack and decide what is final. What ships is the applied result.
02 - Pack textures. File, External Data, Pack Resources. Every image the material references now lives inside the .blend and is ready to embed in the FBX.
03 - Bake anything procedural. If the material leans on noise, gradients or node math, bake it to an image texture first. Unbaked procedural shading does not exist on the other side.
04 - Apply transforms and set the origin. Scale and rotation applied, origin where the receiving artist expects it - usually ground level, centred.
05 - Name things. Object names travel. Mesh_001 x14 is a gift to nobody; thirty seconds of renaming is a professional courtesy.
06 - Export with the right options. Selected objects only, path mode that copies textures next to the FBX, and embedded media if the receiving tool supports it. Bake animation on if the rig uses anything clever.
The settings that matter
| Setting | Why |
|---|---|
| Limit to selected objects | Stops helpers, reference footage and the kitchen sink riding along with the delivery. |
| Path mode: copy, then embed | Textures travel with the file instead of pointing at folders that only exist on your machine. |
| Apply modifiers | The delivered file shows what you see, not what the stack would have done later. |
| Bake animation | Constraints and drivers become plain keyframes the receiving software can read. |
| Smoothing: face, not edge | The one flavour of smoothing every engine and importer agrees on. |
Where people get pink
Nine times out of ten the report is the same: the model arrives, the geometry is perfect, the materials are pink. That is FBX telling you the image files are missing at the paths it wrote down. Repacking and re-exporting with copied textures fixes it permanently. The tenth time, the material used a node setup beyond the Principled BSDF, and the fix is a bake.
Where AI fits
Generated assets leave the scene through the same door as everything else - there is no special AI export. The practical difference is that generated meshes often carry procedural-looking materials that were never real textures, so the bake step does the heavy lifting. Budget it, and the rest of the checklist is exactly as smooth as for a hand-made model.
Where it stops
No export setting rescues a scene that was never finished. Constraints nobody baked, materials nobody packed, a subdivision nobody applied - FBX will faithfully deliver all of those as problems. The format is a courier, not a proofreader. Read the checklist once more before the upload finishes, not after the client opens the file.