Issue importing Blender armature parented to animated object

Hello,

I’m quite new to Unity but thanks to its awesome community I’ve been able to sort out most of the problems I’ve had so far.

However, I’m now having an issue when using Blender armatures and trying to parent them to an animated object (e.g. a chain of metaball animated using an armature parented to a rotating cube).

Actually, when not parented both models animate correctly when I import them in Unity. However as soon as I try to link both object issues appear.

When parenting within Blender, Unity shows up 2 armatures:

  • one parented to the rotating object (but not animated)
  • one animated but not parented to the rotating object

When exporting objects unparented and trying to parent the armature within unity, I “lose” the animation.

Well, all in all, I feel quite lost and dont’t know what I’m doing wrong (maybe a noobie mistake :smile:).

I would be thankful to anyone helping me :wink:

PS: I use Blender’s built-in FBX exporter as I’ve note yet been able to make Unity import .blend files.

375002–12978–$animation_test_154.blend (847 KB)

Don’t use Blender 2.5, if you want Unity to import your models directly!
Use 2.49b and the import should work. If you use 2.5, you have to use the fbx exporter.

hey pedro

i just took a look at your file and it seems you are using a mix of armature based and object based animation and you blend em together in the nla editor. as far as i am aware of, only armature based animation gets imported into unity correctly. and i don’t think the animation mixing of the nla editor is exported at all (haven’t tried it actually…)

parenting: i had some strange results when i tried to parent stuff with a armature to something else. i know jessy did a lot of tests with that. maybe he can shed some light in here.

generally, i would try to work with 2.49 until 2.5 is officially out of beta and supported by unity. thats also why your blend file isn’t imported. only fbx import work at the moment (don’t know to what extent).

the easiest way for me was always to do the animation as a action in the action editor (dope sheet in 2.5). so make a action for “walk”, “jump”, and so on. that way, they get imported very nicely into unity and you have a clean blender file.

the supportanimation can easily be done in unity either with a script that rotates the whole thing while you play the armature based animation or with the integrated animation editor.

Thank you Dantus and woodn for your answers.
Gonna first have a try with Blender 2.49 using only actions and see how it performs :wink: