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Archive and Export

With editing, modding, and validation behind us, the last stop is getting a finished bot back out of Studio: freezing it for safekeeping, or exporting it to other formats for use elsewhere. These all live in the Bot menu on the main menu bar.

The Bot menu open on the main menu bar, showing Archive, Export Prefab, and Export URDF among other items.
Archive and the export options live in the Bot menu.

Archival​

Both a Bot and a Mod Bot resolve their dependencies when they are loaded, so improvements made upstream flow through automatically. That is exactly what you want while iterating, but sometimes you want the opposite: a frozen snapshot that will not shift underneath you, so a result stays reproducible no matter what changes upstream.

Bot > Archive, from the main menu, does this. It zips the bot together with every asset it depends on, following its references transitively (base bots, attached bots, referenced models, and so on), and writes a single .superdex_bot_archive file. The archive is fully self-contained and loads exactly like any other bot file, so you can hand it off or shelve it knowing it will build the same way later.

The contents of a .superdex_bot_archive opened as a zip, with folders for arms, arm_hand_combos, hands, and torsos plus archive metadata files.
Inside a .superdex_bot_archive: the bot bundled with all of its transitive dependencies.

Prefab Export​

Bot > Export Prefab exports just the articulation side of a bot as a .mochi_prefab. This is useful when something was modeled as a bot but you later decide it should be a plain articulation, with none of the extra bot baggage. You are left with the articulated structure on its own.

An fr3 Bot asset tile next to the fr3 Prefab exported from it; the prefab is posed differently because it no longer carries the bot's default pose.
A bot and the prefab exported from it. Bot-only information is dropped in the process, such as the default pose, so the prefab spawns in a different configuration.

URDF Export (XML only)​

Bot > Export URDF writes the bot's structure back out as a .urdf file. This is an XML-only export: the mesh references are not converted to the formats URDF tooling usually expects, DAE for visual meshes and STL for collision. They keep pointing at whatever files the bot already uses, so if you plan to simulate the exported URDF, you will need to convert those meshes offline first.

The XML still has real value for interoperating with software that expects URDF, such as ROS or Pinocchio, so SuperDex Studio remains a useful authoring tool for teams who would rather run their robots in a tool they already use.