I have a Blender animation whose frames switch the objects visible and invisible. In Sketchfab’s language, it is a “stop motion” animation. Unfortunately, Sketchfab has yet to support stop motion for Blender. Is there a workaround available?
I am thinking that in the worst case scenario, I will export my objects from Blender to .obj files and then move on with Sketchfab stop motion for .obj. However, doing that will lose my Cycles material setup.
Any advice is appreciated!
@xiumingzhang “stop motion” is solely a way to easily create hide/show animations; it creates an animation that changes models visibility (using a scale channel). This is indeed not (yet) supported for blender files.
In your case, if I understand it correctly, you’d like sketchfab to support visibility channels. And unfortunately this doesn’t work for blender animation yet. It works tranlfor FBX animation so you could probably try to export an FBX from Blender (but sometimes those are messy). That would be less cumbersome than exporting all your poses in distinct OBJs.
Regarding materials, I’m not sure your cycles would be correctly translated in FBX. Note that our cycles support needs to be improved too. Do not hesitate to link some URLs or send us some sample if you need more help.
Thanks for your reply! @mrchlblng
I just tried converting my Blender animation to an FBX animation, but the Blender visibility settings are messed up – all objects are showing up at the same time (hence, no longer an animation). I think this is a Blender-FBX conversion problem, but before I go ahead fix that, I want to check if Sketchfab supports a “stop motion” FBX animation (where objects are switched visible and invisible across frames)? If the answer is yes, I will go ahead fix the Blender-FBX conversion.
Material-wise, the FBX file doesn’t seem to have any material setup at all.
https://sketchfab.com/models/2a4f728af67d4383939d17de9a9275e6
My original Cycles setup is as follows.
@xiumingzhang FBX definitively supports visibility channels.
Before going the FBX way, I forgot that we now have some support for alembic that would also handle this so you could try to export (if you’re using Blender 2.78+).
Regarding materials, they would be lost though (we generate one material per alembic object/node but do not read abcmaterials at the moment). However, if you use “standardized” texture names, maybe you would end up with “decent” materials. @waleguene do you have some tricks to help here?
@xiumingzhang yeah, alembic could be another solution for you.
As @mrchlblng said, we generate one material per alembic object, that will have the same name as the node.
By naming your textures (image files) following a given syntax, you can also take the advantage of our automatic texture setting, described here:
So, for example if you have a node named Box001, and three textures names Box001_diffuse.png, Box001_metal.jpg and Box001_normal.png, your should end with a material named Box001 with the three textures in the good channels.
I hope it helps, keep us in touch 
