Animation information storage

Yesterday I had my first Unity crash when exporting an .fbx file from Maya. I had exported the same rig countless times before but this time I inadvertently switched to the Unity editor while Maya wasn’t done exporting the .fbx file. And Unity politely melted.

When I re-exported my character I discovered that all my animation clips were gone, replaced by the “Take_001” default animation. Which means I had to manually re-enter every animations and their options. And manually re-create the character’s avatar. Not fun. At all.

So my question is: is there a way to save all that animation-related information outside of the .fbx container itself? So that if the situation occurs again I can just access those animation data and re-apply them on the character’s animation side?

I will reply to my post here: yes, it is possible to export separate animation .fbx files. Although in case of a crash at import time, the info on the specific animation would probably get toasted as well. But at least it would leave all the other ones intact, which is the goal here.