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I've acquired a great quad model. I skinned and animated it to a rig build by a Mel script. It works great as far as editing the animation using sliders and parameters in Maya. When I export the file as an FBX file to Unity3D, it does not animate. Is something being lost in the translation from Mel to the rig? Unity needs a boned rig, is this procedural rig not the equivalent of a rig built and animated with the skeleton tools in Maya? I've check that I have a 'Reference' folder, I've set keys, changed root name to "Hips".

Thanks for any insight on this question.

dDuane

Lex Li
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Digital D
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  • You need to understand the rig in order to import it into Unity, How have you tested the current rig? do you mean blend shapes and sliders for fingers and such? Basically you'll need to map every bone, unless you have a template file or luckly the script used the same naming convention – Eric Fortis Jun 05 '11 at 01:43

2 Answers2

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I don't know what Maya you are using, but I've always used 2010. This is the workflow that we used for a small unity 3D game project:

Export all of the animations in one scene as a .fbx. Be sure you just select the geometry (it usually helps to have it all grouped, but if you can't for some reason that's okay) and hit export selected.

These FBX export options should be checked:

Geometry: Edge smoothing, Tangents and Bi-normals

Animation: Animation, Bake Animations, Bake Animations, (range of animation), step = 1

Deformed Models: Deformed Models, Skins, Blend Shapes (if using these), Curve Filters, Resample as Euler Interpolation, Input Connections, Instances to Objects, Referenced Containers Content (if using any references),

FBX File Format

Binary

FBX200900

When you bring this into Unity, set animation generation to "store in root." If all of your animation is in this one file (which it should be). The "split animations" box should be checked and define the names and range of these in the chart below. When you eventually create an animation blending script, drag and drop it on the animation object within the player prefab, not the prefab itself.

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If you are transferring the file with no errors and there is no animation then there are three issues to look at.

First, you may have accidentally not exported the keyframes. Make sure the box is checked to export animation on the FBX export UI.

Second, it's possible that the object that contains the actual keyframes is not being exported. When you animate using the MEL scripted GUI, find out where the actual keyframes are on the rig and make sure that object is exporting with the rest of the character.

Third, the object might be transferring fine but depending on the rig setup the connections/constraints/whatever might not be working or supported in Unity. You might consider baking the animation to the skeleton before transferring to the engine. To do this, select the skeleton, click [Edit -> Keys -> Bake Simulation].

JayG
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