FBX to OBJ converter — geometry and materials
VTubeMe's FBX to OBJ converter writes your .fbx as an OBJ with its .mtl and textures, zipped into one download. The mesh survives, the skeleton does not come along. Free, five conversions a day.
What survives, measured
The converter opens your .fbx in Blender on our server and writes the OBJ from there. OBJ is the format almost every 3D program has read since the 1990s, which is its point — and it is also the format with the least room in it, which is the part converters rarely mention.
We converted a rigged character with 93 bones, one skinned mesh, 39 shape keys and 9,286 triangles. The OBJ came back with 9,286 triangles, its one material, its UVs — and zero bones, zero weights, zero shape keys. A second file, a 123-bone game character with seven materials, behaved the same way: all seven materials and all 9,995 triangles, no rig.
This is the format, not a setting. OBJ has sections for vertices, texture coordinates, normals, faces and material assignments, and no section for anything animated or deformable. Every FBX-to-OBJ converter on the internet does exactly this; the difference here is that we say so before you spend the upload.
What we do take care of is the shape. A skinned mesh is written as the armature currently deforms it, so a posed character arrives posed rather than as its undeformed bind data.
The .mtl and the folder it expects
Materials go into a sibling .mtl file, which names its images by plain filename — no absolute paths, which is what makes the result portable. The images themselves are copied next to it and the three are zipped together. Unpack the zip and keep them in one folder; importers resolve the .mtl relative to the .obj.
The one thing we cannot fix is an FBX whose texture paths point somewhere that no longer exists. A material file we produced in testing named its texture correctly and the image was nowhere on the machine that made the FBX, so nothing could be copied.
What this conversion cannot do
Measured on real files, not assumed. Everything below is a property of the formats or of the pipeline, and knowing it beforehand is cheaper than discovering it in your 3D tool.
No skeleton, no blendshapes
Measured: 93 bones and 39 shape keys in, none out. If either matters, this is the wrong target — GLB keeps both in a single file, and FBX to FBX is not a conversion you need us for.
Animation does not travel
The skeleton is written, the motion curves are not. Reading an FBX's animation costs about 1.5 GB of memory on a long clip, which is more than the converter container has, so the importer is asked to skip it and the exporter writes none. A file that arrives with a walk cycle leaves with the same rig in its bind pose. If what you have is the motion rather than the model, the FBX to VRMA converter is the tool that keeps it.
Textures only survive if they exist
An FBX carries its images inside it or names them by path. Embedded images are written out beside the .obj; named ones are copied if the path still resolves. A file that points at a folder on the artist's own computer arrives with a correct .mtl and no image next to it. Ask the model's author for the texture folder — nothing can extract what was never in the file.
The zip can be bigger than the file you uploaded
OBJ has no compression and no shared texture table: the geometry is written as text, and one image is written per material slot, so a model that reuses the same map across six materials gets six copies of it. A 52 MB source FBX in our corpus came out as a 24-file, 55 MB zip. Nothing is wrong when that happens — it is what the format costs.
Five conversions a day, per account
This pair is free and takes no credits, but one account gets five conversions per rolling 24 hours across all six pairs together — the converter is one machine and this is what keeps it answering. Each slot frees itself 24 hours after it was used; nothing expires at midnight. Conversions that fail are not counted.
Frequently asked questions
Does FBX to OBJ keep bones or animation?
No. OBJ has no place in it for a skeleton, skin weights, morph targets or keyframes — we measured a 93-bone, 39-shape-key character going in and zero of both coming out. The geometry, the UVs and the materials are all preserved. Convert to GLB instead if the rig has to survive. FBX to GLB instead (rig kept) →
Why is the download a zip?
Because a textured OBJ is three or more files — the .obj, the .mtl it references and the images the .mtl names. They have to arrive together and stay in one folder, so we zip them rather than hand you a geometry file that opens grey everywhere.
Is the mesh modified?
No. Triangles are carried across one for one — 9,286 in and 9,286 out on the file we measured — with no decimation or re-topology. A skinned mesh is written in its deformed shape so it looks the way it did in your 3D tool.
Can I 3D print the result?
Usually you want STL or 3MF for printing, and OBJ is a reasonable intermediate that every slicer-adjacent tool reads. Be aware that a character mesh built for real-time rendering is generally not watertight — separate eyeballs, floating hair cards, open sleeves — so a printer's repair step is a separate job, and we do not do it.
What if my FBX is ASCII?
It is refused before anything is uploaded, with a note to re-export. ASCII FBX is the text dialect of the format and almost no importer reads it; the fix is the “FBX Binary” option in your tool's export panel — Mixamo's download dialog has it too.
The other format pairs
All six are free, all six run the same pipeline, and all six say what they drop.
GLB to OBJ
GLB in, OBJ out — free, zipped with its materials.
FBX to GLB
FBX in, GLB out — free, one file.
OBJ to GLB
OBJ in, GLB out — free, one file.
GLB to FBX
GLB in, FBX out — free, one file.
Blender (.blend) to FBX
Blender (.blend) in, FBX out — free, one file.
Only want to look at the file? GLB viewer, FBX viewer and OBJ viewer all run on your own device — nothing is uploaded.
Is your model going into VTubing?
Converting a character and then wondering where its rig went? If the destination is VTubing, neither OBJ nor FBX is it — the same rigged FBX becomes a VRM, humanoid skeleton mapped, that VSeeFace, Warudo and VNyan load directly.
Open the VRM converter