How can I export separate animation files from Maya?

Unity Engine
1

Hello guys, I’m trying to export individual animation files from Maya and I’m confused by a number of things.

First (and I might be wrong on that) in my mind an exported animation is a list of keys and values of joints changing over time. And usually a default “binding pose” (a frame of reference) is included. So again, the way I understand it, no geometry is involved here, since that animation will be later applied to a character rig which contains all the deforming meshes.

So I would like to know how is that supposed to be done exactly? My goal is to be able to export animations from Maya and apply them to the player character in Unity (which of course uses exactly the same rig, since it’s the same character).

I have tried exporting .fbx files with a group containing just the animated skeleton and the animation comes through fine, but then I don’t know how to let the player character know it should use it. When I select the player character asset in the Project panel and click on the Animations button I can only see the animations that were exported at the same time as the rig itself. But how do I “drag-and-drop” my new separated animation to add it to the list?

I have read in the docs that if you export an animation with a file name like “myCharacter@myAnimation”, then Unity automatically adds “myAnimation” to the “myCharacter” animations list. But it doesn’t seem work…

Oh and I use the Unity 4 beta, Maya 2012 and the 2011 version of the built-in Maya .fbx exporter.

2

Ok, I think I have it working pretty well by now. So to answer my own question: when exporting an animation you are actually exporting the whole character (geometry included), not just the skeleton.

Then, in Unity, you assign an avatar to your animation rig, which is of course the same as the original rig for which the animation is made (just click and drag the avatar from the original character file). This is necessary to get the little green and red circles checking the validity of your animation.

And then you’ll be able to use this animation by clicking and dragging it to the appropriate slots. The only thing that’s supposed to work and doesn’t is the naming convention “character@animationName”. Animations that follow that naming convention don’t actually appear in the list of animations available for the original rig. Don’t know if it’s a bug or if I’m doing something wrong, but so far that’s not a big deal.

3

Wow, it’s super gay that u had to work this out on your own. I also have found very limited resources on the internet for explaining how this is done. im half way through my project now so its too late to make this my workflow… thanks for working it out though! I’ll have a better idea of how to do this in future from now on.