Looking for techincal information on blender rigs for use in Unity

Unity Engine
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1

Hi all, first time poster here, so forgive me if I screw something up…

I’m a blender user with decent skills and I’m looking for information on how to organize a animation rig in blender so it can be imported to Unity.

First, what is the preferred way to export from blender to import into Unity? .fbx format?

Now lets say I have a character and an animation in blender and I want to import it into Unity. It’s my understanding that the hierarchy of blender rigs aren’t compatible with Unity. For example, a blender rig might have a shoulder bone, it’s child would be the upperarm bone. The upperarm bone’s child would be the lowerarm bone. Does Unity support that kind of hierarchy? Or does Unity expect each bone to have it’s own loc/rot/scale information that is not dependent on the bone’s parent?

I once created a tool for blender to create game ready rigs from blender’s rigging system, and I had a couple of scaling issues with bones, I think. I quit working on the tool because I didn’t think there was any interest in it.

Now I am thinking I need to re-look at that tool, because I see a few posts on how to get blender rigs into Unity over on blenderartists.org.

So I am looking for advice on this subject and possibly someone who would test the rigs my tool makes with Unity. I can offer modelling/texturing/rigging skills to someone who helps me with testing…

Thanks for your time,
Randy

2

Well, no replies yet…
I know bumping posts is usually frowned upon, but since it’s been months since I’ve posted this question, I thought it would be ok.

Randy

3

Sure. You’ll probably want to install this in Blender.

That doesn’t really make sense because you can create any hierarchy you want in Blender, so it could be compatible or not depending on how you set it up.

Yes, that’s how it’s commonly done unless you have some weird rig. In fact, if you are going for humanoid animation retargetting then you really don’t have any choice. If you are only using the animations that you made specially for your model then you can structure your hierarchy however you want.

Sounds like you’ve made rigged characters before, right? Have you tried just importing one of these characters in to Unity an doing a simple Mecanim tutorial? That probably would answer most of your questions.

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You’ll answer most of your questions by simply making a simple rig, making some animations, and bringing it into Unity. Learn by doing. You’ll work out the kinks and your preferred workflow a lot faster that way.