How to alter the mesh of an animated prefab without breaking prefab or losing animations?

Questions & Answers
1

Hi guys,

I’m a new Unity user so it’s possible this is a simple, stupid problem I’m having. I feel like I have tried everything… Here’s the situation:

I have an animated .FBX from the Asset Store, and I’ve made some minor changes to the mesh in Blender. I’ve saved this again as an .FBX and imported it to Unity. The mesh changes are minor and wouldn’t break any animations, it all plays back perfectly in Blender.

Now, this Asset from the Store ALSO came with a demo Prefab which is all set up with a script and animations. So, I can either just simply switch out the mesh into this prefab (seems like the simplistic option), OR I can go about re-building a new prefab with this new mesh and setting up the dozens of animations and a few scripts which came with it.

So, going with the first option, how do I switch this new mesh into the prefab I have which is already set up with animations? If necessary I can provide screenshots to help explain…

Thanks for reading.

2

As far as I am aware, this will not work. Animation data requires vertex information, vertex number and position etc. If this information has changed (and hence is no longer valid) the animation will break.

The easiest way to achieve this (as far as I am aware) is to use the Animation Retargetting feature of Unity which requires sharing an Avatar or an Animation Controller between two separate models.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=unity+retargetting&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=AzsOVqnqA8rTU-ycg4gE

Only Humanoid is officially supported but I have had success in Generic using certain methods with compatible rigs.