FBX character animation won't play after exporting and uploading to Instagram

Spark AR Questions
#1

FBX character animation won’t play after exporting and uploading to Instagram

Heyhey,
we have a complex FBX character animation from a customer using an armature, which we imported into out SparkAR facefilter. Then animation runs both in SparkAR Studio as well as when testing it on our Android phones. Unfortunately, after uploading and exporting to Instagram, it does NOT.

We have checked the file in blender, and the actions, armature and keyframes are set right, or at least in such a way that it works for other objects that we used this way.

The asset as such seems to be in order, the filesize for the whole filter for all three supported platforms is below 3 meg, the filesize for the compressed 3d model in the asset summary is around 500 kilobytes.

We’re out of ideas on what could be causing the animation to work both in the software and on our phones, but not after uploading. The instagram upload is a black box in this regard and information is very hard to come by.
Does anyone know what we could be looking into to make it work? Maybe project capabilities?
Thank you very much!

#2

Hi, welcome to the lab :slight_smile:

Unfortunately it’s a bug with IG app itself right now from what I’ve gathered. Nothing we can really do, if the armature etc works in the spark player, there’s no issues with it as is.

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#3

Hey @Boris,
thank you very much for the warm welcome and for getting back to me so fast!
Is there any way of knowing which animations will and which won’t work? As our customer has shown working filters and we have worked with fbx in the past, it is hard to put the agrument to them that the expensive model they just had built and rigged won’t work due to an IG bug…:frowning:
I’ll try some more things, but have little hope :frowning:
We also have an audiofile which plays at different speed in IG than in the studio and in the player… is this related?
Thanks again!
Johannes

EDIT: I haven’t worked with glTF yet, but could that be an alternative for us?

#4

I don’t think anyone on the user-side has solved it, but the Spark devs are aware of it so hopefully it will be fixed in the next release. FWIW I think everything gets converted to glb format under the hood, so maybe it’s a problem with the converter that is used. You could try exporting as glb and maybe it will bypass the conversion step. I’m just guessing, but it’s worth a shot!

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#5

Hey @josh_beckwith, thank you as well for the reply!
After some playing around with bone weights and export settings I was able to export our model as glTF from blender, and it would play in 'studio and in the 'player as well, but again, not after uploading, so no luck :confused: We’ll have to talk to our customer about it.
The bit about conversion under the hood is still interesting though, is there public information on the actual pipeline? Cheers!

Also, josh, I just recognized you from your YT! Thank you for those videos!

#6

Glad you like the tutorials! I’ll have more coming soon!

I don’t remember where I saw it, but I found a glb converter while digging around in the spark app files. Also, the spark devs say that gltf/glb is the recommended format (at least that’s what they said 2 years ago :slight_smile: ). Unfortunately there’s not much publicly available about how things work under the hood…

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