i just can’t seem to get an animation created using an armature to import from blender. the moment i add the ‘armature modifier’ to the mesh, the mesh changes from being rendered using a ‘mesh renderer’ component to a ‘skinned mesh renderer’ component and is no longer rendered to screen. are there any docs that go through the animation import from blender, or can anyone point me to what i might be doing wrong?
(i have tried manually exporting an .fbx with all settings i can think of as well as letting unity export by itself from the .blend)
You’re using Blender 2.45, right? I haven’t really done that much with animations, but have you tried applying your modifiers before exporting? There’s also this page in the Blender docs in case you haven’t seen it before:
thanks for the link…it is very useful (though i am still stuck on this issue…) applying the modifier just seems to ‘unskin’ the mesh from the armature… looks like its a trip over to the blender forum for me
You should not need to aply the armature modifier. In fact, I don´t use it at all. All I do is to parent the mesh to the armature and select armature as option. Create groups and set them as needed. Unity should read fine the model even if you animate, scale, move or rotate it.
If you had a copy of the unriged model in your scene and you just updated this with a riged version, better try deleting it and puting a fresh new copy of the animated model.
thanks for the tips, now everything falls into place… the answer is that i was using ‘envelopes’ to drive my animation instead of ‘vertex groups’. (the issue was not with the modifier after all… unity seems to deal with the rigging ok when you rig using it or not). I believe that my mesh was always there somewhere, but as the armature did not have vertex groups assigned to it (just envelopes) it was being sent somewhere far off the render area… as this caveat in the fbx exporter page (linked to below) implies…
“When using armature deformed meshes, All vertices’s must be influenced by at least one bone, or it will look like the vertex is in some far off place.”
[for the sake of completeness: the ‘Fbx_test_examples.zip’ linked to from the fbx exporter page on the blender wiki has excellent working examples of blender to fbx that work in unity…]
If I may ask something related, does the entire model need to be rigged first before importing to Unity? I have tried to test out just the right hand of my model to make sure its animation looks right before rigging the whole thing and finding out I’d need to do it all over again, but I get the same problem described here. An unrigged version shows up just fine in Unity.
yes, from my experience any vertices not assigned to a bone have their positions transformed to some far flung coordinates on import to unity. i would suggest just assigning the other half of your model to a single, temporary bone in blender…this works for me.
