Blender @animation Armature Hierarchy problem

Unity Engine
,
1

Hi there,

I’ve made a test 3d character in blender and added a Armature to my character.
The character has a basemesh and some clothes / hair meshes. When I export the model completely with all animations/armature and meshes. The model works and all animations also work within Unity.

But I don’t want it to be 1 file. I want all the animations to be separate.
So I exported the base character with the armature. And imported into Unity 3D.
And the hierarchy looks something like this.
->Female
|-> Armature
|-> Hip (etc more bones)
|-> SkinnedMesh01
|-> SkinnedMesh02
But when I export only the rig with one animation the hierarchy looks like this for the animation. (No armature gameobject)
->Female@Idle
|->Hip
|->AnimationClip

When I know try to play the animation on the base model it doesn’t work. Any suggestions how I can export them, so that they both have the same structure?
This is with Exporting FBX 7.4 Binary. When I export it with FBX 6.1 ASCII it doesn’t have this hierarcy problem.

2

How are you exporting only one animation? Do you delete the remaining “actions” in Blender before you hit FBX export?

Blender’s new FBX exporter (since Blender 2.74) is a bit moody. To output a working FBX animation clip it needs to have:

  • No mismatching curves in the action (for every curve there must be a bone with the same name)
  • At least one mesh animated by the Armature (and also at least one Vertex Group matching a bone)
  • The mesh and the Armature must be exported at the same time (and be masters, not linked or proxies)

Try exporting at least one mesh together with your animation. It can even be a dummy mesh (i.e. single triangle), but it must be parented to the Armature and have at least one Vertex Group matching a bone in your Armature.

I’m using a Python script myelf to accomplish the same, but it expects the animations to always be stored in a separate .blend file from the character (I have files like guy.locomotion.blend, guy.acrobatics.blend, guy.firearms.blend, etc.). If you think it’ll be of use I can clean it up and post it here.

1 Like
3

I decided to just use the FBX 6.1 ASCII exporter. Since it works perfectly with that one.
This way I get the result I want to.

To export a single animation. I just have the action editor open and I select the animation to export. If there is an animation selected in the action editor it will use that one as default take. Make sure the start and end frames are correctly set in the bottom animation bar. And I use the following export settings. Another strange thing is that when I’m exporting in ASCII I have to set scale to 100.

I do think it’s weird that there are so many differences when exporting as ASCII and the BIN.

4

Ah, I forgot the “All Actions” checkbox was still there in the old exporter :slight_smile:

The Ascii FBX exporter is ancient (Blender 2.5x in 2010 or earlier) whereas the binary FBX exporter is as recent as 2.74. It’s a complete rewrite and intended to replace the Ascii one. That’s why the two exporters are completely different. I haven’t heard of any plans to remove the Ascii FBX exporter in the near future, however.

I’ve had trouble with that scale option in Blender in the past and instead used Unity’s scaling feature (setting “UseFileScale” in the .fbx.meta file also seems to avoid the issue). But that was 3 years ago and I haven’t re-checked since then :smile: