Hi, I have noticed in the download tutorials that an asset (or 3d max) is created for each animation.
Could someone explain me the reason of that?
I’m not quite sure what your question is.
Could you maybe explain it a little more in depth?
2 ways to import animations, All in one file and split it in the inspector, or split it in max/maya and then import each with the @ added to the filename ie. name@idle , name@walk and so on.
Both ways have pros and cons.
For example in the locomotion system demo, the fbx under the Hero Artwork folder contains copies fo the hero geometry each one with its own animation. It doesn’t seems very optimized and I wonder about the reason of working in taht manner.
Thats just the way they chose to do it I guess. You can make a series of animation sequences in max and save them as a single file. Use the unity editor to set the keyframe ranges for each animation clip, and give it default paramaters like loop etc.
Check out one of the platformer demo tutorial projects to see a ready made lerpz character with his animation sequences already set up. How to do it is covered in the unity manual. It’s dead easy so long as you know the keyframe numbers for your animation sequences.
Keep in mind that the locomotion system wasn’t created by Unity.
But as Tysoe said, it may just be how that particular person chose to do it.
Multiple meshes won’t be created a build time anyways, since they’re not used.
Well personally, I never managed to get looping animations looping perfectly any other way, so maybe they had the same problem. Exporting as one long animation and breaking them up always leaves a tiny(or sometimes not so tiny) glitch in the animation. Exporting separate files for each animation resolves this for me.
I guess if theres some animation optimization during the export process then keyrames for looping animations might not match up. I always found biped problematic for combining animations, especially looping and started using CAT instead. Not that CAT doesn’t have it’s own occasional stability problems.
I used the Unity editor to seperate the anims for the Dax robot game I was working on for someone and do recall having one of the loops being off by 1 frame, but that was fixed by changing the keyframe range by 1.
There is one really key reason for the multiple FBX option:
Teams with more than one animator
Using the multiple FBX files for animated characters simply lets many animators work on animation for the same character at the same time.
Its also worth noting that none of the extra stuff gets built into the final deployment, only the animation clips needed are sent out, so the two methods are ultimately exactly the same in terms of output.