I’m posting in the hope that you can save me some time.
I’m creating medical teaching material (eg here) rather than traditional humanoid or 2D games
as such I am wanting to animate simple object movement and shader changes
I am not having success importing animation from Blender into Unity, as none of my animations involve bones or amatures, eg of the sort of simple blender animation I do here pass: ‘knightsfan’
I need to start animating within Unity I think rather than trying to get Blender to play nice
as I’m not using boned/ rigged humanoid characters I need to use the legacy animation component as opposed to the mecanim, I can pretty much ignore mecanim right?
looking at the sort of thing I’m animating (object moving along a mesh), any tips or assets you’d recommend to improve my workflow? - currently I just plan to create an animation clip in Unity and keyframe the spheres along the mesh manually
Hi - so as you’ve discovered Unity only supported bone driven animation via import (plus blendShapes / Morphs now). So if your workflow suits animating in blender then the objects that are animated to move, rotate or scale would need to have that animation data baked in to a bone skinned to to that mesh, and although we cannot outline that specific Blender workflow there are likely to be a number of way to tackle it at that side, look up baking animation on the web.
Alternatively as you discussed it could be worth animating directly in Unity as you then have control not only of the simple keyframed movement, rotation and scale, but you can also use in built materials to animate e.g. a UV scroll or colour changes to the material. Animating objects along a spline can also be done with a number of good value tools from the asset store.
Regarding mecanim, this is holistic approach to animation so it might still be worth considering as it provides excellent tools for controlling what is being animated and under what conditions (the state machine) and allows you to set up transitions, so although you may not need to make use of the humanoid avatar and re-targeting features, you might want to take advantage of the animator and will still need to create an animator controller in any case.
Ok wow thanks that’s good to know Olly. Someone else was saying that the Legacy module will likely be discontinued in the future so Mecanim is the way to go too. Completely changed my approach.