My astronaut model made in Blender and contains 15 or more animation clips, so the final size of .FBX for Unity is not suitable for me (waste time for export and import, on testing iterations of every animations).
My attempts to export mesh separately from animation are failed. Unity cannot even use my separated mesh to animation preview in inspector view.
Is there any tool for export single action from Blender? Like Mixamo.com which generates one .FBX for mesh and separate .FBX file for every custom animation.
I’m doing something very similar to what you want.
I’ve got my model in one .blend file and my animations in multiple other .blend files. A script then exports only the animations from the separate files by creating a dummy mesh (see picture) and exporting that instead of the full character.
The resulting .fbx files are still not tiny, however, because Blender’s FBX exporter exports one keyframe for every bone in every animation clip at every single frame (this is called “Baking”). Nothing you can do about that. It won’t bloat your final game size, at least, because Unity eliminates most of those extra keyframes again (see “Anim. Compression”).
I made other workflow, with exporting NLA strips as separate clips. But have a trouble with Blender, which exports NLA strip without armature’s root node. Since Unity losts a root transformation due this behavior, I applied your rede with dummy triangle parented to an armature (with automatic weights as first successful try).
So, separate clip has this dummy, but it is a such piddling thing
