To rig and skin model in Blender, but animate it in Unity via Unity’s animation panel? Because no matter how I try to animate in Blender, it never works properly later in Unity and I can’t make it work with Mecanim.
That was my plan with a model I created, but I had no success. I was trying to extend the third person controller with a few new animations, and I couldn’t get it to function the way I expected it to. Googling around, it seemed to me that the way most people still do things is to rig, skin, and animate in Blender (or other 3D app), and import the animations. Mecanim works well for building the flow/blending between those animations, but not for building them from scratch.
Now for simple objects like doors and moving panels, that’s another story. I’ve successfully animated scenery objects using just the animation panel and Animator state machines.
There is Skele in the asset store at $31.
Using that and free animations Unity Tech and other asset store vendors supply along with Mecanim retargeting have provided will probably give you better results, faster, than animating in Blender.
This are also some free collections of re-targetable animations you can use as starting points to alter in Skele:
I didn’t even think to look for an editor extension to handle this. Skele looks like a good candidate. Thanks for the recommendation!
Goat, I’m basically on a $0 budget here, so I need to animate myself. Also I’m pretty good at this.