Blender import / export removes any ability to play animations on a model

Unity Engine
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1

Hi!
I’m in serious need of help. I have tried to sort this out for many days, but I can’t make it to the finish line.
I have this model from the asset store. I need to make an edit to the model, so I import it to Blender.
In Blender, I see there is no armature, the entire skeleton is represented only by empty points.
There is no armature, no bone weights, nothing.
Upon export, I can use the model just fine in the Unity editor, but the model shows this warning:

Sure enough, if you make a build of the game, the models are invisible, which has halted the progress of my project for a while now.

Here’s what I tried:

Using this script, I rebuilt the armiture manually. When I check it the model has weight maps and everything looks fine.
I export the model, but it seems to be incompatible with the animations. The model gets kind of animated, but it looks like a deflated blob, as if all the weights were 0.
And this is as far as I got.
Tried a million things, but just can’t get it to work. Anyone has any ideas?

Open questions:
How the hell does this model even work in the editor? As long as I don’t edit the files, the animations work just fine.
Where do my manually created weight-maps go?

I can see they got made, so why isn’t unity using them?
I would have just tried the same process to rebuild the animations, but the script I linked does not transfer animations from the points to the bones, so I’m stuck with what I got.

9689909–1382375–Slime.zip (22.8 KB)

3

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it a lot!
But after two days of deepdiving into this I decided it simply isn’t worth it and just made the enemy myself from scratch.
Thankfully I had picked up all the necessary tricks since back when I got the model.

5

This is not a Blender export bug.
The asset was authored with a non-standard rig (empties instead of a real Armature).
Unity can preview it in the Editor, but during build Unity strips invalid skinned meshes, which is why the model becomes invisible.

If you need to edit it, the mesh must be re-rigged with a proper Armature and bone weights in Blender, otherwise keep all edits inside Unity.

I ran into a similar workflow issue while testing input tools during development – documenting small fixes like this saved me hours:
:backhand_index_pointing_right: https://mousedpianalyzers.com