maya animation import

Questions & Answers
1

I'm sure this has been answered before, but I can't find it, partly because I'm not even sure what I'm looking for. I created a mesh in maya, rigged it, set an IK Handle.. when I play the animation in Maya it works just find (very simple animation.. it's my first so I figured I'd keep it simple).

I have tried exporting to fbx format and Maya Binary, but when I import the object as an asset into Unity it does not animate. I've tried both formats, looked for some option to "bake animations", etc. but nothing works. I setup the animations in Unity to loop from frame 1 to 22. I put code in the Update function of a script attached to the object to play it's "idle" animation... still nothing.

I'm sure my problem is how I am exporting from Maya, but I've tried everything I can think of and I've found many answers for how to create animations and how to import a maya file into Unity, but nothing for that small gap in between.

Does anyone know of a tutorial that takes you from creating the animation to getting the animation to play in Unity?

2

I figured it out.. apparently it's not good practice to use IK handles when animating for a game engine.. it's better used for animating cinematic scenes.

For anyone else who comes across this, I simple saved my maya scene to my unity projects asset folder and saved the file. Unity now reimports my model, animations, etc. pretty much automatically when I make changes to the maya file.. no need to export / import.

3

hey I had the same problem as you did. but what I did was just change the export settings to export a FBX2009 instead of its default in max 2011 which is FBX2011.

Used baked animations and it works fine now. I am also using IK solvers.

4

I saved the .mb scene in my Unity Assets folder but when I import it and play the game my model still sits there. Are you sure that's all you did or did I miss something out?

5

I was able to bake the keys in maya 2007 using edit → keys → bake simulation. After that the fbx animations exported fine. Otherwise it looks like the fbx plugin doesn’t export the ik animations properly.