Convert GLB to FBX
This is a conversion no web tool can do, including this one. Blender does it free in about a minute, and because both formats carry materials and animation, it is one of the few conversions where almost everything survives — provided you set three things correctly.
We cannot write FBX. The format is closed, the only complete implementation is Autodesk’s own native library, and the open library that reads FBX has no exporter. Any site offering GLB to FBX in a browser is uploading your file to a server running desktop software. Blender does it locally, free, and better.
Converting a GLB to FBX in Blender
Blender is free from blender.org and the whole process takes about a minute once installed. Written for Blender 4.x.
Start from an empty scene
File → New → General, then press X to delete the default cube
If you skip this, the default cube ends up in your FBX and in whatever engine you import it into.
Import the GLB
File → Import → glTF 2.0 (.glb/.gltf)
Select your .glb and import. Everything comes in together — geometry, materials, textures and animation — because a GLB packs all of it into the one file.
Check the materials appeared. Open the Shading workspace and look at one: the base colour should have an image connected. If everything is grey, the GLB may have had no materials to begin with.
Apply all transforms
Select all (A) → Object → Apply → All Transforms
This bakes position, rotation and scale into the mesh data so the objects carry a clean transform. It is the single best habit for exporting from Blender, and it prevents most of the scale and rotation surprises at the other end.
Open the FBX exporter
File → Export → FBX (.fbx)
The options panel is on the right of the file browser, in collapsible sections. Three of them matter.
Limit what is exported
Include → Object Types: Mesh, Armature
Untick everything else. Blender exports cameras, lights and empties by default, and a glTF import often brings in empties for the scene nodes, which arrive in your engine as objects nobody asked for.
Set the scale handling
Transform → Scale: 1.00 · Apply Scalings: FBX All
FBX All bakes the scaling into the mesh, which is what Unity and Unreal expect. The other options leave a scale factor on the node, which arrives as an oddly scaled transform.
glTF is in metres and Blender is in metres, so the numbers already agree. FBX convention is centimetres, and Blender writes the unit into the header correctly — most importers honour it. If your model arrives 100 times wrong, this is the setting to revisit.
Set the axis conversion
Transform → Forward: -Z Forward · Up: Y Up
These defaults are correct for Unity and Unreal. glTF was Y-up, Blender converted it to Z-up on import, and this converts it back on the way out.
Include the animation, if there is any
Bake Animation → ticked · Armature → Add Leaf Bones: unticked
Untick Add Leaf Bones — it appends an extra bone to every chain that only clutters the skeleton in a game engine. Leave Bake Animation on if the model moves.
Export, then check the textures
Export FBX (the button, top right)
Read the next section before you send the file anywhere: the textures are the part of this conversion most likely to go wrong, and they go wrong silently.
The textures, which are the real difficulty
A GLB carries its images inside itself. An FBX can embed its images too, but Blender’s exporter does not do it by default, and this is where the conversion quietly breaks.
When Blender imports a GLB, the images arrive as packed data inside the .blend rather than as files on your disk. When it then exports an FBX, it writes paths to image files — which do not exist anywhere, because the images were never unpacked. The FBX arrives at the other end with materials pointing at nothing.
There are two fixes. The simpler one is to tick Path Mode: Copy in the FBX exporter’s Include section, and then press the small Embed Textures button that appears beside it. That packs the images into the FBX itself, which is what you want for a file you are sending to someone.
The other is to unpack the images to disk first — File, External Data, Unpack Resources — and then export with Path Mode set to Copy. That gives you an FBX plus a folder of images, which is the arrangement most game pipelines actually prefer, because it lets artists edit a texture without touching the model.
Either way, check before sending. Import the FBX back into a clean Blender scene and look at whether the materials still have their images. It takes thirty seconds and catches a failure that otherwise surfaces at the other end.
What survives, in detail
Geometry survives completely. Both formats store triangles with the same kind of attributes.
Materials survive partially. glTF describes a surface with base colour, metalness, roughness, normal and occlusion. FBX materials are older — Lambert and Phong — and Blender maps between them as best it can. Base colour and normal maps come across reliably. Metalness and roughness map onto specular and shininess, which are related but not equivalent, so a metal surface will need adjusting in the destination.
Animation and rigging survive, which is the main reason to use Blender rather than any other route. Both formats carry skeletal animation properly. Tick Bake Animation in the exporter and the clips come with the model.
Scene structure survives as a node hierarchy. glTF nodes become Blender objects become FBX nodes, with names intact.
What does not survive is anything glTF-specific: KHR extensions for transmission, clearcoat, sheen and so on have no FBX equivalent and are dropped without a warning.
Whether you actually need FBX
It is worth asking, because FBX is chosen out of habit more often than out of need.
If the destination is Unity, it reads glTF through free importers — glTFast is the common one and is well maintained. Unreal has supported glTF import natively for several versions. In both cases importing the GLB directly skips this whole page, and avoids the material and texture degradation described above.
FBX is genuinely the right answer when the destination is Maya, 3ds Max or MotionBuilder, where FBX is the native interchange format and glTF support is weaker. It is also right when a studio pipeline or an asset store requires it, which is common and not negotiable.
If you do need FBX and Blender is not available, the Autodesk FBX Converter is free from Autodesk’s own site — but it converts between FBX versions and a few older formats, and does not read glTF, so it does not help here.
Where we can actually help
If what you actually need is geometry in another program rather than FBX specifically, these do run here in your browser — OBJ keeps the textures as files beside the model, and the unwrap survives in every case.
Questions
- Is there really no way to convert GLB to FBX online?
- Not in your browser. Sites that offer it upload your file to a server running desktop software, which means your model leaves your computer. Blender does it locally and free in about a minute.
- My FBX has no textures when I import it elsewhere.
- The most common failure in this conversion. Blender imported the GLB’s images as packed data and then exported paths to files that do not exist. Set Path Mode to Copy in the FBX exporter and press the Embed Textures button beside it.
- Does the animation survive?
- Yes. Both glTF and FBX carry skeletal animation properly, and Blender handles the conversion. Tick Bake Animation in the exporter and untick Add Leaf Bones.
- Do I even need FBX for Unity?
- Often not. Unity reads glTF through free importers such as glTFast, and Unreal imports glTF natively. Importing the GLB directly avoids the material degradation that FBX conversion causes.
- Why can browsers read FBX but not write it?
- Reading was reverse-engineered by the open-source community over many years, and assimp’s WebAssembly build includes that reader. Nobody has written a matching exporter, because the format is undocumented and writing one correctly is much harder than reading one.
Where to go next
Related guides
Tools that do part of this here
About these formats
Checked against current software versions on 2026-09-11